Ken Arnold

Augmenting Intelligence for Everyday Creativity
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I’m interested in research and teaching at the intersection of data science, people, and Christian faith. My main projects are around AI for Everyday Creativity, including:

  • Applying today’s large AI language models to help writers express their ideas in their own words
  • AI for instructors to see what students are learning
  • Helping everyone understand what AI can do, and accurately calibrating both our excitement and our concerns.

Highlighted Posts

ML Interactives

As I’ve been teaching AI / Machine Learning, I’ve made a few interactive demos to help students understand some concepts. Here’s a few:
Feb 15, 2024
1 min

Debugging Hints

Here are a few debugging hints that I often give students.
Apr 24, 2023
3 min

Mapping to Mimicry

Loss minimization is a flexible tool.
Apr 4, 2023
6 min

Transparency for Generated Text

Lightweight marks for AI-generated text
Feb 17, 2023
4 min

Does increasing ‘alignment’ increase risk?

OpenAI’s stated purpose for working on the sort of adjustments to language models that led to ChatGPT was to “align” their behavior with human goals. Their motivation for…
Feb 9, 2023
2 min

Language Models have Personas?

RLHF is fascinating.
Feb 6, 2023
6 min

Humanity of the Gaps

Reality is spiky.
Feb 3, 2023
3 min

Avoid Magical Thinking about AI

Even if you’re not a computer scientist, you should learn enough about AI that you can steer its progress.
Jan 24, 2023
3 min

Stop trying to detect computer-generated writing.

It’s a risky distraction that just encourages an arms race.
Jan 17, 2023
2 min

Without Acknowledgment: Cultivating Gratitude in an ML age

Creativity support tools based on machine learning hide the human authors that contributed to the work. Does it have to be that way?
Jan 12, 2023
4 min

Interacting with AI: X instead of Y

AI is typically designed in ways that push people aside, but what if we could reimagine the relationship?
Mar 28, 2024
2 min

Simplifying Instructions

LMs can simplify LM system messages.
Mar 28, 2023
4 min

Intelligence via Mimicry

AI systems aren’t magic or inherently objective. For all their strengths, most AI systems mimic human behavior.
Mar 28, 2023
4 min

Flourishing with Intelligence Augmentation Systems

I’ve noticed some dominant narratives in public discourse around doing-what’s-right-with-AI. I’ll give them some oversimplified names; this is a complex topic.
Mar 7, 2023
4 min

Information and Decision

A design space of interactions with AI systems
Feb 21, 2023
3 min

Two Ways that LLMs Hallucinate

Do you ever make your decision first and think about your reasons later?
Feb 16, 2023
6 min

ChatGPT Doesn’t Have a Database of Facts

It was trained to be believable, not to be right.
Feb 3, 2023
2 min

Self-Study Advice

Practice solving problems.
Jan 30, 2023
2 min

Multidimensional Array Terminology

A surprisingly large amount of the thinking that goes into implementing neural net code is getting the shapes of multidimensional structures right. I’d heard that from…
Jan 27, 2023
2 min

Solomon’s proverbs about AI

A reflection without words on the difference between wisdom and its imitation.
Jan 16, 2023
3 min

Language Models for Species-Scale Collaboration

How knowledge fusion will continue the trend of scaling humam collaboration
Jan 11, 2023
2 min
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Updates

Teaching

I teach computer science, data science, and machine learning. Recent classes:

See CV for others.

Doing research with me

I welcome students who are interested in human-computer interaction, machine learning, data science, interactive visualization, and Christian perspectives on data and computation. I have a range of ideas and ongoing projects, but bring your own interests too! Please contact me via email (Calvin: ka37) or Teams.

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, Harvard, 2020
  • MS in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT, 2010
  • BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell, 2007

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