Research and Initiatives

AI@SAS Initiatives

A number of SAS programs and centers across disciplines engage with AI as a central part of their research and teaching activities.

Data Driven Discovery Initiatives

Price Lab for Digital Humanities

Computational Neuroscience Initiative

Linguistic Data Consortium

Computational Biology

Crime and Justice Policy Lab

AI@SAS Research

AI is accelerating research and opening up new questions, engaging faculty in a wide range of fields.

AI and the Mind  •  AI and Language  •  AI and Society  •  AI and Justice  •  AI for Networks  •  AI for Human Cells  •  AI for Climate  •  AI for the Universe

AI and the Mind

What does deep learning teach us about how we think? And how can we evaluate AI using insights from human psychology? Faculty are using AI to understand how we reason, make social decisions, store memories, perceive and conceptualize the world around us, and more fundamentally what gives rise to human intelligence.

Joseph Kable

Jean-Marie Kneeley President's Distinguished Professor of Psychology

AI and Language

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized both the modeling of language and how we as a society interact with AI. Penn social scientists and computer scientists use LLMs to study how we represent language in the brain, how messages in the media impact different social groups, and ways that AI impacts human behavior.

Emily Falk

Professor of Communication, Psychology, Marketing, and OID; Vice Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication; Director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center

Mark Liberman

Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics; Director of Linguistic Data Consortium

Charles Yang

Professor of Linguistics; Director of Undergraduate Studies in Cognitive Science

AI and Society

Social scientists are using AI models to uncover intricate patterns from complex data, from vast volumes of text from social media to archival documents to explore a range of social issues and trends. Considerations of human ethics and equitable outcomes are a critical part of research and practice in these fields.

John Lapinski

Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Political Science; Director, Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies

Xi Song

Associate Professor of Sociology

Philip Tetlock

Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology and Management

AI and Justice

AI holds great promise yet at the same time generates significant concerns in the context of applications in the justice system. Penn researchers are using AI to address a range of practical concerns, from error rates in forensic toolmark analysis to misidentification rates in facial recognition algorithms.

Maria Cuellar

Assistant Professor of Criminology, Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science

Greg Ridgeway

Rebecca W. Bushnell Professor of Criminology, Department Chair of Criminology, Professor of Statistics and Data Science

AI for Networks

How do blood vessel networks optimize the flow of nutrients in mammals, and what can we learn from rivers, leaves and other networks? How do social networks shape language, and how does language shape social networks? Penn faculty are using AI to better understand complex networks that are ubiquitous in our bodies, in nature, and in social media.

Eleni Katifori

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Undergraduate Affairs Chair

Joshua Plotkin

Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor of the Natural Sciences

Marc Schmidt

Professor of Biology; Co-Director, Undergraduate Neuroscience Program

Colin Twomey

Executive Director for the Data Driven Discovery Initiative

AI for Human Cells

The amount of available human genetics data will soon reach the scale of a billion individuals. Biologists and physicists in the School of Arts & Sciences are tackling key questions in the human genome, the structure of proteins, and the remarkable ways they exchange signals.

Eleni Katifori

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Undergraduate Affairs Chair

Junhyong Kim

Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Biology; Co-Director, Penn Program in Single Cell Biology; Secondary Professor, Computer and Information Science

Joshua Plotkin

Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor of the Natural Sciences

Sarah Tishkoff

David and Lyn Silfen University Professor Departments of Genetics and Biology

AI for Climate

AI has enabled new approaches to forecasting complex climate dynamics with global consequences, and may become a powerful new tool accelerating innovations targeting the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. SAS faculty combine rigorous physics-based research with AI to model climate and study its impact on socio-economically diverse communities.

Michael E. Mann

Presidential Distinguished Professor; Director of Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media

Irina Marinov

Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Science; Long Term Guest Investigator, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Michael Weisberg

Bess W. Heyman President's Distinguished Professor of Philosophy; Deputy Director of Perry World House; Editor-in-Chief, Biology and Philosophy; Director of the Galápagos Education and Research Alliance

AI for the Universe

The School’s astronomy group are world leaders in applying AI to big data astronomy, in collaboration with theorists at the Center for Particle Cosmology. Recent discoveries include the largest comet ever found, advances in the cosmological puzzles of dark matter and dark energy, and ‘interpreting’ what deep learning tells us from galaxy images.

Gary Bernstein

Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Bhuvnesh Jain

Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences; Co-Director of the Penn Center for Particle Cosmology; Co-Director of the Penn Data Driven Discovery Initiative

Masao Sako

Arifa Hasan Ahmad and Nada Al Shoaibi Presidential Professor of Physics and Astronomy