“The others are coming. They are coming to get us, take over our country, colonize us, and replace us. They’re an existential threat.” These types of racist logics are a regular trope around the world. Some governments incorporate this type of messaging into disinformation campaigns, which have ripple effects of unintentional misinformation on social media.

At times UT-Austin's Good Systems Symposium felt a bit like listening to a Drake album, with conversations heavily focused on trust issues, broken promises, and community engagement (maybe not so Drake on that last one). Artificial intelli­gence experts took turns calling out the human side of a technology that, on its surface, appears to be very much not human. The emphasis on the natural world extended all the way to the decor – a string-of-pearls plant centered and two Swiss cheese plants framed the panelists.

One in eight Texans experiences food insecurity, according to the non-profit agency Feeding America. That means 1.4 million Texas households are food insecure, with limited or inconsistent access to nutritious food for an active, healthy life. The USDA’s most recent survey on the issue reported that Texas is among the top nine U.S. states with a higher prevalence of food insecurity than the national average.

Sharon Strover is a professor of communications in the Moody College of Communication and chair of Good Systems at The University of Texas at Austin. We sat down with Strover in advance of the 2023 Good Systems Symposium, taking place April, 3 - 4, on UT Austin’s campus.

A Q&A with Maria De-Arteaga, Assistant Professor at the McCombs School of Business Information, Risk, and Operations Management Department and member of the Good Systems project, Designing Responsible AI Technologies to Curb Disinformation. Maria is a speaker in a roundtable at the 2023 Good Systems Symposium focused on how to use AI to advance racial justice and combat disinformation.

NPR's Adrian Florido speaks with Peter Stone, computer science professor at the University of Texas, on an open letter calling for a temporary halt in development of advanced artificial intelligence.

For almost a year, the founder and CEO of Documenting Austin’s Streets and Homeless (DASH) has spent almost the entirety of every week using his grassroots organization to help with outreach and clean-up efforts that he says are sorely lacking in the capital city.

Artificial intelligence is a rapidly growing field that has the potential to revolutionize many industries, and Austin, Texas, is emerging as a hub for AI innovation. The city is home to a number of AI companies that are working on cutting-edge technology in areas such as autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, and computer vision.

Dr. Matt Lease, professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, provides a better understanding of AI and Chat GPT.

More than 80% of our health is impacted by social determinants — where we live, work, eat and play. And the “live” part is crucial: Everything from air quality, access to healthy food and health care, and economic stability have an outsize impact on a person’s ability to get and stay well. But what happens when climate change begins to threaten those things?