Panelists: Prof. Jonathan Brennan, Hrithik Ravi
Moderator: Prof. Rada Mihalcea
Interactive Activities: Yara El-Tawil, Snehal Prabhudesai
Organizer: Michigan AI Lab, in collaboration with the Ann Arbor District Library
When: September 5, 2025, 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Where: AADL Ann Arbor downtown,1st Floor Lobby (343 S 5th Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48104)

AI is increasingly embedded into our daily lives, influencing the way we think, learn, and interact with the world. But as we rely on algorithms to help us write, navigate, and even make decisions, several fundamental questions arise: Is AI shaping our habits, our skills, and our sense of self? Are we enhancing human capabilities, or do we end up outsourcing them? Join us for a conversation with experts in AI, psychology, and ethics as we explore how AI may be quietly reshaping our cognition, relationships, and daily lives. We’ll ask where the line lies between assistance and overreliance, and what it means to remain human in a machine-augmented world. With interactive activities developed by graduate students Snehal Prabhudesai and Yara El-Tawil.

About the speakers:

Jonathan R. Brennan is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at the Univeristy of Michigan where he directs the Computational Neurolinguistics Laboratory. His research focuses on how the human brain creates and makes sense of language, drawing on theories and methods from linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science. This research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. He recieved his PhD in 2010 from New York University and completed post-doctoral training at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He received the Early Career Award from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language in 2019 and is the author, in 2022, of "Language and the Brain: A slim guide to Neurolinguistics.

Hrithik Ravi is an AI researcher currently working with Prof. Rada Mihalcea and Prof. Ambuj Tewari to explain why AIs can't solve basic planning and reasoning tasks. He completed his BSE in Computer Science and MS in Machine Learning, both at the University of Michigan. His previous research mathematically proved how AI generalizes on inputs it didn't see during training, and was published at a prestigious international AI conference. He aims to start a PhD next year, and conduct deep research to develop a better, rigorous understanding of AI's capabilities and limitations. You can follow him on Twitter (@r1pster7).

Moderator: Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in natural language processing, with a focus on multimodal processing and computational social sciences. She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and served as ACL President (2018-2022 Vice/Past). She is the recipient of a Sarah Goddard Power award (2019) for her contributions to diversity in science, and the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009).