Speaker:

Hamsa Bastani, Associate Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions, and Statistics and Data Science, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Title:

Designing Human-AI Collaboration to Build Human Expertise

Abstract:

Effective human-AI collaboration not only requires human expertise, but also produces it: how we interact with AI today shapes our capabilities tomorrow. This talk draws on three large-scale field studies to examine how AI can improve immediate performance while supporting long-term skill development.

First, in an experiment with nearly 1,000 high school students in Turkey, we find that unfettered GPT-4 access improves assisted performance but harms short-term learning in mathematics. Second, a 12-week study with chess academies shows that self-regulated AI use (where students can request additional help at any time) substantially reduces learning gains relative to system-regulated assistance. Our analysis suggests that harm is concentrated within students’ “zones of proximal development,” where assistance displaces productive struggle; most requests occur outside this zone, with no evidence of harm. This suggests that targeting assistance to situations where it does not displace productive struggle can preserve AI’s performance benefits while protecting learning. Finally, generative AI is both the poison and the cure: the conversational data generated through human-AI interactions offer a window into users’ knowledge states and problem-solving processes, which contains rich information for targeting assistance. In collaboration with the Taipei City Government’s Department of Education, we use student-chatbot interactions and reinforcement learning to personalize the sequence of practice problems across ten high schools, significantly improving learning over a five-month Python certification course.

Taken together, these studies suggest that AI can be designed to preserve and create opportunities for productive struggle, strengthening the human expertise on which effective collaboration depends. Joint work with Osbert Bastani, Angel Chung, Stefanos Poulidis, Alp Sungu, and others.

Speaker Bio:

Hamsa Bastani is an Associate Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on developing novel machine learning algorithms for social impact, including in healthcare and education. She has worked with national governments to deploy algorithms at the country scale for targeted border COVID-19 screening and essential medicine access, and co-led one of the first large field studies of generative AI tutors in high schools. Her research has been published in leading outlets including Nature, Management Science, Operations Research, and PNAS, and has garnered numerous recognitions, including the Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research, the INFORMS Pierskalla Award for best healthcare paper, and the George Nicholson Prize.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/91360427929

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, networks, and artificial intelligence. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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