George Mason is building a nexus of collaboration and resources on campus, throughout the region with our vast partnerships, and across the state, called AI²Nexus.

As a model for universities, AI²Nexus is based on four key principles: Integrating AI to transform education, research, and operations; Inspiring with AI to advance higher education and learning for the future workforce; Innovating with AI to lead in responsible AI-enabled discovery and advancements across disciplines; and Impacting with AI to drive partnerships and community engagement for societal adoption and change.

George Mason University is driving rapid AI adoption and advancements across the Commonwealth.

As the largest and most diverse university in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., George Mason University is leading the future of inclusive artificial intelligence (AI) and developing responsible models for AI research, education, workforce development, and community engagement within a modern university.

As AI reshapes industries, George Mason combines fearless ideas that harness the technology’s boundless potential to address the world’s grand challenges, while creating guardrails based on informed, transdisciplinary research around ethical governance, regulatory oversight, and social impact.

Led by the university’s inaugural vice president and chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO) Amarda Shehu with an AI Visioning Task Force, George Mason is reimagining operational excellence in every facet of the university.

Source: AI Webpage

My mission is to advance the science of consciousness, and to use its insights for the benefit of society, technology, and medicine.

I am Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where I am also Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. I am also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness.

I  was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press), a role I served from 2014-2024. I currently serve on the Editorial Board of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and on the Advisory Committee for 1907 Research and for Chile’s Congreso Futuro. I was Conference Chair for the 16th Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC16, 2012) and was an ASSC ‘member at large’ from 2014-2022.  I previously co-directed the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness, and I was an Engagement Fellow with the Wellcome Trust (2016-2020).

My research has been supported by the EPSRC (Leadership Fellowship), the European Research Council (ERC, Advanced Investigator Grant), the Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).  Check out these profiles of me and my research in The Observer, The New Statesman, and Quanta.

Source: Website

Eric Saund is a researcher in Cognitive Science and a consultant in AI and Machine Learning.

Previously, Eric spent nearly 30 years working at Xerox PARC as a senior researcher and is an expert in natural language processing and cognitive architecture.

Eric has a degree from CalTech, and a PhD from the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT.

Paul is a forecaster with over three decades experience exploring the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change. He teaches forecasting at Stanford University and advises organizations worldwide. Paul is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Paul serves on a variety of not-for-profit boards including the Long Now Foundation, and the Millennium Project.

Paul’s essays have appeared in a wide range of publications including The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Foreign Policy, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. Paul holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University and Stanford University.

Source: Website

[This website is a demonstration and is not currently affiliated with the Imagining The Digital Future Center nor Elon University.]

Imagining the Digital Future (ITDF) Center is an interdisciplinary research center focused on the human impact of accelerating digital change and the socio-technical challenges that lie ahead.

Imagining the Digital Future’s mission is to discover and broadly share a diverse range of opinions, ideas and original research about the likely evolution of digital change, informing important conversations and policy formation.

February 29, 2024, ITDF released its first new research report, “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence by 2040,” for which, in two separate studies, a large group of global digital life experts and the U.S. general public were asked to share their opinions on the likely future impact of AI. The global experts predicted that as these tools advance we will have to rethink what it means to be human and we must reinvent or replace major institutions in order to achieve the best possible future. The issues the Americans polled were most concerned about are the further erosion of personal privacy, their opportunities for employment, how these systems might change their relationships with others, and AI applications’ potential impact on basic human rights.

Vision

The Institute of Digital InnovAtion (IDIA) is George Mason University’s commitment to inclusively shaping the future of our digital society, promoting well-being, security, and prosperity.

IDIA is a sector leader that provides transdisciplinary research, innovation, and next-generation workforce development strategy across the university for scaled, sustainable growth in digital innovation, leverages synergies, strengthening the innovation ecosystem and growing capacities for transdisciplinary research, scholarship, and innovation, supports placemaking, instigating and building research and innovation communities around places and activating and supporting a culture of transdisciplinary research and shared research infrastructure, and amplifies the visibility and awareness of George Mason University as a globally recognized leader for its world-class research, innovation, and economic impact activities, as well as its next-generation students and scholars.

Source: Website

The Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) is the first organization to integrate artificial intelligence participation, technology and governance during the design, development, deployment and oversight of AI systems. We investigate what trust in AI looks like, how to create technical AI solutions that build trust, and which policy models are effective in sustaining trust.

TRAILS is a partnership between the University of Maryland, George Washington University, Morgan State University and Cornell University.