AI-ALOE Webinar with Shayan Doroudi from University of California-Irvine

​The Intertwined Histories of Artificial Intelligence and Education

​With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in 2022, came a wave of discussion and claims around how AI would transform education—for better or for worse. For many, “AI in education” became synonymous with “generative AI in education” as though AI had never impacted education before.

In this talk, Dr. Shayan Doroudi shows that the history of AI has been intertwined with education since the dawn of AI. In particular, he describes three strands in the history of AI—the Neat, the Scruffy, and the Connectionist—which represented not only different ways of building AI but also different visions for education. Despite their differences, all of these strands were united in studying learning in both humans and machines, a perspective that has been largely forgotten in both AI and education research today. He concludes by discussing how these different strands can help us think about the role that generative AI could play in education today.

Shayan Doroudi is an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Education where he directs the Mathe Lab. His research is at the intersection of the learning sciences, educational technology, and educational data science. In addition to studying AI as a practical tool that can advance education, he is particularly interested in the theoretical relationship between AI and education as two fields that are fundamentally about the nature of learning and knowing. Doroudi received his B.S. in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.