Episode 4: Demystifying AI and Inspiring Women: A conversation with Dr. Alexis Pierce Caudell

Alexis Peirce Caudell is a children’s geographer and lecturer in the Informatics Department. Her scholarly interests focus on questions about the role of technologies in children’s spatial imaginaries and lived experiences. She earned her Ph.D. in Informatics from Indiana University, and also holds degrees in Instructional Technology from the University of Georgia, and Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition, you can also learn more about our podcast guest and reach out to her here.

The Center of Excellence for Women & Tech is a welcoming community on Indiana University’s campus that strives to empower women students, faculty, and alumni to expand their leadership skills, build confidence about technology, and foster community and collaboration between all fields of study and industry. The Center’s Instagram handle is @IUwomenandtech. Please follow us there!

Project Green Light is an initiative by the Detroit Police department in partnership with local gas stations wherein they have installed real-time camera connections with the police headquarters in an attempt to minimize crime.

You can also read the report Dear Future Women of STEM that Dr. Caudell discusses in the episode. This report contains letters written by current female STEM students to younger STEM enthusiasts about their unique experiences.

Big thanks to Rebecca Ramsey at IU's Center for Language Technology whose work makes this podcast possible! Since 1959, CeLT has overseen the language and computer labs in Ballantine Hall, with the mission of providing the highest quality services to support language teaching, learning, and research at Indiana University. Find out more about their services and resources here.

Jeannette Lehr: 
Hello and welcome to the women of IU podcast. The show that highlights and celebrates the important work women do every day at Indiana University and hopes to inspire future women leaders. This podcast is brought to you by the Center of Excellence for Women and Technology. I'm Jeanette Lehr. The Center of Excellence for Women in technology, often referred to as CEWIT, has fourteen student run alliance teams focused on different areas of technology and empowerment, and today we will feature an interview hosted by one of those teams, our ethical AI team. The ethical AI team works to create a representative, safe and equitable space to explore and analyze the ethical elements of artificial intelligence. This community of students strive together to learn and teach about artificial intelligence, demystify how AI impacts us as a society, and provide networking events to synergize connections among those interested in AI at IU. Amy Kinney, one of the ethical AI teams interns, is going to be interviewing Dr. Alexis Peirce Caudell. Dr. Alexis Peirce Caudell is a lecturer in the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, and will be talking with Amy about her work at IU, teaching about ethics and technology, and generative AI, preparing students to navigate a world that is changing rapidly and about being a woman in the industry. Before we dive into that conversation, please rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts and follow the Center on Instagram at @iuwomenintech. You can find out more about today's guest in the show notes and at womenandtech.indiana.edu. 

Amy Kinney: 
Hi, my name is Amy Kinney, and I am a current ethical AI intern here at the Center of Excellence for Women and Technology, and I'm here with Doctor Alexis Peirce Caudell. So why don't you go ahead and tell me a little bit about yourself and your work at IU. 

Alexis Peirce Caudell: 
Sure. It is so lovely to be here with you, Amy. I am a lecturer in the Department of Informatics in the Luddy School and as a lecturer, my primary responsibility for IU is teaching. So, about 70-80% of my time is teaching. I primarily teach undergraduate courses for informatics, and I teach across different topic areas if you will. So, I teach I202 which is part of our informatics core, that's social informatics, that introduces students to sociotechnical thinking. I teach the computer and information ethics course and then I teach a year long project course for our senior capstone students in informatics, where teams of students build, design and build an information system from scratch over the course of the year. Then I teach another course called technological nature, which is all about challenging our ideas about the relationship between places that we might label as nature with technology. So, that is primarily what I do here at IU. 

Amy Kinney: 
OK, interesting and I know that you said that you teach I202, and I would love to hear a little bit more about the case studies in that class. I know I took that last semester, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of them. 

Alexis Peirce Caudell:  
Yes. So, I get to teach I202. There is a cool group of faculty that teach it. I get to work with Dr. Jennifer Terrell and Dr. Chase McCoy on that course. I only get to teach it in the fall due to my other teaching obligations. In that course, it is an introduction to sociotechnical thinking. So, helping students understand that technologies do not live or exist in isolation, but rather they are part of a larger sociotechnical context. So, in that course, we look at different case studies. We look at algorithmic hiring, which often students are intrigued by because many of them are going up for interviews and may have to participate in this sort of algorithmic hiring process. We look at Project Green Light, which is based in Detroit, Michigan, which is a facial recognition project pretty much in the city center of Detroit, where the police Detroit Police are partnered with local businesses, schools, libraries, those kinds of places to install surveillance cameras and green lights in a quest to reduce crime.  

If you took the course, you know that that is not without complication, right. Then, the other case study that we look at in I202 is something called the VI-SPADAT, which is a tool that is designed to help establish somebody's vulnerability if they are experiencing homelessness and how to then rank them for available housing. But again, like each of those technologies don't exist in isolation. They exist within communities. They have histories, right. They are subject to human design and understanding. So, that's how we wrestle with those cases in that course to try and understand both sides of the equation in part so that if we're going to go out and solve problems that are relating to technology, we understand that we can't just. It's not just a technical solution, right. There may be a policy implication. There's a community component, right. There are all these other pieces that are not just the technical. 

Amy Kinney: 
Interesting, and I was just curious about what are some of the key things that students should keep in mind when they're using technology, especially in the classroom setting, just how to use it responsibly. 

Alexis Peirce Caudell:  
Oh, so every faculty member is going to give you a different answer. So, I am not willing to you know, give a different answer to what faculty use in their syllabi, right. So, every faculty member makes that decision as to what responsible technology looks like in that classroom. Some people are like no laptops. I'm like, please use your laptops. So, I think, like, being open to thinking through this right. We are really busy people, faculty, students alike. Everybody is busy, right. One of the things that ethics requires of us is to slow down and really think through why we are making the choices we are making and the implications of those choices. You know. So, it's great to have a laptop to be able to take notes but is that laptop also then distracting you and you've got your e-mail pinging off on the right hand side when you're in class and you're feeling like you're being torn in multiple directions, right. I don't know if that's ever happened to you in class, right. Technology is great when it works, but also are you prepared to function without it in a classroom. I think this question of generative AI in our classroom is going to be an ongoing thing. I know university wide, we're trying to understand it and again, I think it's going to look different in different disciplines and different schools in different classes, with different faculty members, right. Because it's going to. Its application is different in different contexts, right. If you're a chemist and you're trying to understand molecular structure, generative AI can be really useful. If you're trying to come up with marketing campaigns, generative AI is quite a useful space to start, right. I have a friend in Canada who teaches marketing and they're using generative AI to generate logos and slogans and marketing campaign. Like that's their starting point. If you're in a coding class, I don't know. I don't know how that changes a coding class, right. So, it's an ongoing process that I think we are all going to be wrestling with, faculty and students alike. 

Amy Kinney: 
Interesting. So, I actually took computer and information ethics myself, and my final paper was actually about autonomous vehicles. So, I just wanted to hear a little bit about your thoughts on that. I know it's a topic in I202 as well. 

Alexis Peirce Caudell:  
So autonomous vehicles are always an interesting one. I don't know. You were not in my class. So, I don't know where your paper landed for autonomous vehicles, but it's one that often comes up right. It's one that gets media coverage. It's one that seems to garner a lot of, like public attention, right. Maybe because many of us drive or if we don't drive, we are pedestrians and we might be impacted by figuratively and literally by autonomous vehicles. So, for me, autonomous vehicles, understanding that humans are the ones making decisions about how autonomous vehicles should be programmed is the most interesting part of this question, right. We are in a rush to implement autonomous vehicles in some states, right. That's often a political decision which is tied to economy, which is tied to values. But I think one of the things we've not maybe spent enough time thinking about is thinking through the values of the software engineers and the people making the decisions about the designs of vehicles, right. In terms of then, how they then program autonomous vehicles to respond to certain things, right. We know that autonomous vehicles are trained to see things in different ways, but do we necessarily train them in diverse situations with diverse populations, right. In terms of what people do and how people behave? So, it's autonomous vehicles are certainly an interesting space. Also, I mean we've now got to add into the mix of generative AI and how generative AI might be used in the design of autonomous vehicles, right. So, the use of generative AI in software engineering, in development, in design is something that we are all beginning to wrestle with and beginning to wrestle with the ethics of that, right. So, thinking about I've been thinking a lot about how to support students in my classroom, in the computer and information ethics course, how to support them in terms of exploring what generative AI can do right, its limitations, where it's useful, where it's not, where it can be helpful to the creative process, and ethical decision making, and where it might actually harm those decision making. So, that's something I am currently wrestling with ahead of spring semester, right in terms of finding the right balance. There's also questions when it comes to generative AI, about equity in the classroom. So, if you are a student who can afford to pay for one of the pro versions of a generative AI service, you have a different experience to somebody who has to use a free version and your results are going to be different and your ability to turn in assignments using generative AI are going to be different, right. What does it do to academic integrity if we do or do not use generative AI? Like where does all this shake out? So, I spent a lot, I mean, a lot of time thinking about this and then it's implication for assignments and class structure and time, right, all of those things. So, it's an evolving field and much of that relies on me trying things out and seeing where they work and where they don't work right. But also, I do try to make space for students to shape that experience as well, right. So, students, you will have a different experience of using generative AI than maybe I do, right and how can I support you in that sort of curious exploration, shall we call it? Because I think for many students, particularly in informatics and Luddy in general, as you graduate from IU, you're going to go into careers where you're going to be asked to use generative AI, or generative AI is going to replace certain pieces of your work. I have a good colleague who now outsourced about 90% of their raw coding to generative AI. So, if coding is your thing, like what does that look like for you in 5-10 years, right. But what value do they then add as a human when they're reviewing that coding, right. We know that generative AI can make websites, design websites, it can make presentations, it can make podcasts, it can make videos, right. How to help students sort of navigate that space and prepare them for a world of work and careers where you're likely to be asked to integrate it into your work, right and how do we do that in a way that supports you is probably one of the things that I wrestle with the most. 

Amy Kinney: 
OK, thank you so much for sharing that. I also wanted to ask what sorts of challenges do you see in your field and how do you think this will evolve in the future? 

Alexis Peirce Caudell:  
So, this is difficult for me to answer because I wear multiple hats, right. There's challenges discipline wise and then there's challenges teaching wise, and they don't necessarily always overlap. So, for me in terms of my discipline, which is children's geography and the intersection of technologies in children's lives, we are continuing to try and understand the role of digital technologies in children's lives globally, right, and that is forever changing because technologies do not stand still. So, understanding, particularly, there's a big emphasis at the moment in trying to understand that intersection with climate change in children's lives. So, that's on the discipline side, if you will. In teaching, this is not going to come as a surprise to you as a current student but understanding and thinking through the role of generative AI in the classroom and learning experiences. Like what is that going to look? What could it look like? What should it look like? That is occupying a lot of our time at the moment, right, trying to unravel that and then just thinking through those pieces in terms of helping students navigate that shifting ecosystem and preparing them to go out into a world that keeps changing, right. So, how do we do that effectively in the time that we have together, when you're a student at IU, those are probably the things that I must think about in terms of teaching and my discipline. 

Amy Kinney: 
OK. Thank you so much and another question I wanted to ask was what is it like for you being a woman in this industry? 

Alexis Peirce Caudell:  
So, that's really interesting, right. I came into informatics by a rather winding path. My original background is in geography. That's how I sort of tend to think of myself, as a children's geographer. But I spent a huge amount of time in the library world as well, both academic and public. Before I transitioned into sort of the academic world of teaching. So, I've sort of had multiple roles and I see different ways the women experience different things in different contexts, shall we say. I do think it's interesting. Just this week, I will admit I rolled my eyes at a colleague who was mansplaining yet again. So, that is a constant thing, helping students also navigate this space, right. Women are still underrepresented in informatics as students, and so we might often have a class that is predominantly men, and so helping young women who are in our class also have a sense of belonging that they should be there, right. That is also something that I strive to do in my teaching, to make sure it's a walking environment for everyone. Simple things like students who are nursing a young child struggle to find places to nurse on campus, right, and finding, identifying those things for students, if that's a need, right. So, there are all those kinds of challenges. There is a recent report, a paper came out in March of this year, so March 2023. It was in the International Journal of STEM Education, and it was titled Dear Future Women of STEM. What was interesting about this paper was that the researchers asked current undergraduates to write letters to future students, future women in their field about what it's like to be a student. What's interesting is that everything that they identified are things that we've identified for decades now about being a woman, in particularly stem, right. So, how to thrive academically about forming communities of learning. Like, that's a really positive thing that students found, like finding family support, finding role models amongst other students, or faculty and sort of just reassuring those coming behind them that they can do it and it's a worthwhile space. But what was interesting to me was literally these are things that we have been talking about for decades at this point and yet these are still things particularly for undergraduate women, are still concerns. 

Amy Kinney: 
Yeah. So, kind of going off of that. What advice do you have for students or women earlier in their careers to succeed? 

Alexis Peirce Caudell:  
Well, I think I could like just copy what some of these undergraduate students recommended, right, because they're probably the best judges for what's helpful as an undergraduate student. But in general, finding a community that is supportive for you, whether that's inside the classroom or out, whether it's inside the workplace or out, is really helpful. I am super fortunate o have multiple tribes of women in different capacities throughout my life that have been supportive and who I can turn to. So, for me, having that support has been really beneficial. So yeah, I think finding your people if you want to go that way, that can provide that support and it might be different people in different contexts, right. It's not just one person. I think for me that has been the most beneficial in my work anyway. 

Amy Kinney: 
On the show we speak with so many accomplished and inspiring women such as yourself. So, we want to know who is a woman that inspires you, that could be someone you know personally and or someone you whose work you admire. 

Alexis Peirce Caudell:  
So, when I think about the word inspiration right. If I go back to Latin, so inspiratus, which is literally to like breathe in, what nourishes my soul, if you will. For me the answer was not necessarily, women who are in tech and succeeding or in my field and succeeding, although I might admire them and be in awe of their work. For me that is categorically I turn to poets and artists and dancers, those people who are making the world a better or beautiful place, if you will, and particularly for me it's poets and artists who are trying to capture the essence of landscapes. This is where my geography background comes in. So, Joy Harjo, who was the 23rd Poet laureate of the United States, Mary Oliver and Nan Shepherd, and Spencer, all of those are women poets who have tried to explore the role of landscape in life and so for me, when I think about inspiring women, it's gotta be those poets for sure. 

Amy Kinney: 
That's an amazing answer. Thank you so much and I also wanted to thank you so much for being here. It was really great talking with you.

Jeannette Lehr: 
Thanks for listening to the Women of IU podcast. Thanks to Dr. Alexis Peirce Caudell for sharing her thoughts, and to the ethical AI team for arranging and conducting this interview. Before we go, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and follow the Center on Instagram @iuwomenintech. This podcast was recorded by Rebecca Ramsey at the Center for Language Technology here at IU, so we want to give a big thank you to Rebecca for her wonderful work and support. Please stay tuned for the next episode of the Women of IU Podcast.