ΑΙhub.org
 

2020-2021 Leshner fellows to engage public on artificial intelligence


by
18 February 2020



share this:
Images courtesy of those pictured and AAAS

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced the selection of 12 researchers in the area of artificial intelligence as the 2020-2021 AAAS Alan I. Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellows. These scientists and engineers were chosen for “having demonstrated leadership and excellence in their research careers and an interest in promoting meaningful dialogue between science and society”.

The 2020-2021 AAAS Leshner Fellows are (full bios are available on the AAAS website):

  • Omalabake Adenle
    Director, AJA.LA Studios
  • Benjamin Grewe
    Professor of systems circuits and neuroinformatics, ETH Zurich
  • Michael Littman
    Professor of computer science and co-director of Humanity-Centered Robotics Initiative, Brown University. Michael is also a trustee for AIhub.
  • Heather Lynch
    IACS endowed chair for ecology & evolution, Stony Brook University
  • Nicholas Mattei
    Assistant professor of computer science, Tulane University
  • Anita Nikolich
    Research professor, director of the Advanced Computational Thinking Center, Illinois Institute of Technology
  • Carolyn Rose
    Professor of computer science, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Brian Scassellati
    A. Bartlett Giamatti professor of computer science, cognitive science, and mechanical engineering, Yale University
  • William Smart
    Professor in the Robotics Program at Oregon State University
  • Biplav Srivastava
    Distinguished data scientist and master inventor, IBM Chief Analytics Office
  • Lyle Ungar
    Professor of computer and information science, University of Pennsylvania
  • John Zimmerman
    Tang Family professor of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, Carnegie Mellon University

The fellows’ public engagement interests and approaches are as diverse as their research, and include online blogs, videos and discussions as well as traditional media, social media, podcasts, books, policy engagement, outreach and public science events and competitions. In addition to engaging the public in discussions about their research, they will promote public engagement among their scientific colleagues and within their institutions.

The AAAS Leshner Fellows program is in its fifth year and is part of the organization’s commitment to science communication and public engagement. The Leshner Leadership Institute was established in 2015 through philanthropic support. The Institute is managed by the AAAS Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology, established in 2004 by Alan I. Leshner, now chief executive officer emeritus of AAAS.

Read more about the 2020-2021 Leshner programme here.




Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.
Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.




            AIhub is supported by:



Related posts :



Memory traces in reinforcement learning

  12 Sep 2025
Onno writes about work presented at ICML 2025, introducing an alternative memory framework.

Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model

  11 Sep 2025
EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus today, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model.

Interview with Yezi Liu: Trustworthy and efficient machine learning

  10 Sep 2025
Read the latest interview in our series featuring the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants.

Advanced AI models are not always better than simple ones

  09 Sep 2025
Researchers have developed Systema, a new tool to evaluate how well AI models work when predicting the effects of genetic perturbations.

The Machine Ethics podcast: Autonomy AI with Adir Ben-Yehuda

This episode Adir and Ben chat about AI automation for frontend web development, where human-machine interface could be going, allowing an LLM to optimism itself, job displacement, vibe coding and more.

Using generative AI, researchers design compounds that can kill drug-resistant bacteria

  05 Sep 2025
The team used two different AI approaches to design novel antibiotics, including one that showed promise against MRSA.

#IJCAI2025 distinguished paper: Combining MORL with restraining bolts to learn normative behaviour

and   04 Sep 2025
The authors introduce a framework for guiding reinforcement learning agents to comply with social, legal, and ethical norms.

How the internet and its bots are sabotaging scientific research

  03 Sep 2025
What most people have failed to fully realise is that internet research has brought along risks of data corruption or impersonation.



 

AIhub is supported by:






 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence