School Notes: Faculty of Arts & Sciences
September/October 2019

Workshop on AI, ethics, and society

The first Yale Workshop on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society was held on April 5 on campus and drew nearly 150 participants. The affiliations of the professors who organized it signaled the interdisciplinary ethos of the event: Jack Balkin (law); Elisa Celis (statistics and data science); Zoltan Szabó (philosophy); and Nisheeth Vishnoi (computer science). The goal of the workshop was to identify emerging challenges, brainstorm potential ways forward, and initiate a Yale-wide effort towards rethinking AI systems from a societal and humanitarian viewpoint.

FAS dean named to a second term

Tamar Szabó Gendler ’87 has been reappointed as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) for a five-year term beginning July 1. Gendler, the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and professor of psychology and cognitive science, is a leading academic within and beyond her fields of specialization. During her initial term, she conceptualized and implemented the FAS’s overall administrative and budgetary configuration, oversaw a program of strategic and transformative faculty hiring across the FAS, marshaled major investments in mathematics, computer science, and statistics and data science, and led the transition to a new tenure system.

Welcome, new colleagues!

The 2019–20 incoming cohort of new FAS professors spans 20 departments, including 12 appointments in the humanities, 13 in social science, and 17 in science and engineering & applied science. This represents a growth of more than 20 over the fall 2018 FAS headcount. Among the 42 newcomers are 16 joining the FAS at the tenured level: Orazio Attanasio (economics), Roderick Ferguson (women’s, gender, and sexuality studies), Greg Grandin (history), Richard Kenyon (mathematics), Theodore Kim (computer science), Ivan Loseu (mathematics), Kaivan Munshi (economics), Fatima Naqvi (German), Laura Nasrallah (religious studies), Andrew Neitzke (mathematics), Rohini Pande (economics), Katja Seim (economics), Philipp Strack (economics), Alison Sweeney (ecology and evolutionary biology), Odd Arne Westad (history), and Lin Zhong (computer science).