Syllabus

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Syllabus

AI in the Real World: Data, Power, & Society is a general education course that explores the conceptual foundations and societal implications of artificial intelligence. The course is designed to provide students with a critical understanding of how AI technologies are developed, deployed, and experienced in various social contexts. No programming experience is required, but students should be comfortable with basic computer literacy and have an interest in exploring the intersection of technology and society.

Course Planning: DTPA Use Case Matrix

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Course Planning: DTPA Use Case Matrix

This document acts as the central syllabus planning ledger for CMSE 101. It inventories core AI use cases distributed across different socio-technical domains. Each case study is mapped through the Data-Tools-Practices-Actions (DTPA) framework to provide a comprehensive audit of how AI systems are designed, deployed, and experienced in real-world contexts.

Perspective Markers Key

Marker	Curricular Meaning
🚀 HYPE	Unpacks corporate marketing narratives of “infinite growth” vs. material realities.
🏛️ STATE	Highlights deployments prioritizing institutional surveillance, carceral tracking, or control.
⬛ BOX	Identifies black-box opacity driven by trade secrets or mathematical unexplainability.
🌳 SYSTEM	Evaluates long-tail structural externalities (labor erosion, planetary carbon costs, systemic inequity).

Domain Overview & Use Case Links

🎓 Domain 1: Education

1.1 Automated Essay Scoring — Surface-feature regression models vs. dialect bias and Perelman’s BABEL generator text.
1.2 AI Tutoring Systems — Conversational Socratic LLMs (Khanmigo) and the risks of equity substitution in underfunded districts.
1.3 AI-Powered Exam Proctoring — Computer vision behavioral classifiers turning students’ homes into spaces of biometric surveillance.
1.4 Predictive Student Retention — Early warning systems reifying historical structural socioeconomic vulnerabilities as individual risk scores.

🏥 Domain 2: Healthcare

2.1 Medical Image Diagnosis — Deep learning radiology diagnostics vs. training set data gaps for rare conditions and diverse skin tones.
2.2 Health Insurance Risk Scoring — Dissecting the landmark Obermeyer et al. (2019) study where billing cost proxies automated systemic medical racism.
2.3 Mental Health Chatbots — Scripted CBT wellness apps deployed to bridge systemic shortages in human therapeutic infrastructure.
2.4 Sepsis Prediction — Real-time hospital clinical alerting tools navigating the high-stakes friction between alarm fatigue and false negatives.

⚖️ Domain 3: Criminal Justice & Surveillance

3.1 Predictive Policing — Spatial-temporal ETAS hot-spot algorithms trapping communities in self-fulfilling carceral feedback loops.
3.2 Facial Recognition in Law Enforcement — Algorithmic misidentification pipelines causing wrongful arrests of Black citizens (e.g., Robert Williams case).
3.3 Risk Assessment at Sentencing (COMPAS) — Proprietary recidivism scoring models illustrating the mathematical incompatibility of fairness metrics.
3.4 Mass Surveillance & Smart Cities — The modern urban surveillance stack integrating acoustics, Stingrays, and multi-vendor sensor data streams.
3.5 Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) — Massive vehicular tracking networks monitoring public spaces and drawing cross-jurisdictional geographic perimeters.

🎨 Domain 4: Art & Creative Industries

4.1 Generative Image Models — Diffusion networks trained on non-consensual web scrapes vs. intellectual property and artist labor models.
4.2 Actor Likenesses & SAG Strike — Generative digital avatars, studio contract negotiations, and the ownership over a performer’s physical identity.
4.3 AI in Legal Knowledge Work — The Mata v. Avianca case exposing next-token loss function confabulations in professional research pipelines.

🌍 Domain 5: Environment & Climate

5.1 Climate Modeling and Weather Prediction — Graph Neural Networks emulating fluid physics vs. regional data starvation in the Global South.
5.2 Carbon Cost of AI — Tracking water footprints, data center grid infrastructure strain, and the material cost of model training cycles.

💼 Domain 6: Labor & Workplace Analytics

6.1 AI Resume Screening & Hiring — Automated candidate sourcing pipelines encoding historical corporate gender and racial demographic baselines.
6.2 Algorithmic Management & Gig Economy — On-demand application dispatchers optimizing continuous piece-rate wages and platform surveillance.
6.3 Sub-Second Productivity Surveillance — Comprehensive keystroke tracking, desk cameras, and mouse metrics intensifying white-collar workplace acceleration.

7.1 Recommendation Algorithms — Engagement optimization logic maximizing screen time, radicalization paths, and societal attention capture.
7.2 Deepfakes & Non-Consensual Media — Generative face-swapping pipelines weaponized disproportionately for harassment, blackmail, and political disruption.

🏠 Domain 8: Housing & Real Estate

8.1 Algorithmic Rent Pricing — Yield management platforms (RealPage) processing non-public lease data to coordinate synthetic market-wide rent inflation.

🌐 Domain 9: Global Supply Chains & Identity

9.1 Ghost Work & Invisible Labor — The distributed international underclass executing traumatizing content moderation and reinforcement learning labels.
9.2 Biometric ID Systems (Aadhaar) — High-stakes identity tracking infrastructure conditioning state survival resources on biometric validation performance.

💳 Domain 10: Finance & Commerce

10.1 Alternative Data Credit Scoring — Ingesting utility histories and digital exhaust data to construct algorithmic proxies for creditworthiness.

🪖 Domain 11: Geopolitics & Warfare

11.1 Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) — Vision-guided drone swarms and automated targeting matching pipelines completely decoupling human decision-making from lethal kinetic actions.

Cross-Cutting Themes

Each use-case is mapped to one or more recurring themes that surface across domains. These themes provide the analytical scaffolding for comparing cases and structuring class discussion.

Syllabus on AI in the Real World: Data, Power, & Society

Syllabus

Syllabus

Course Planning: DTPA Use Case Matrix

Course Planning: DTPA Use Case Matrix

Perspective Markers Key

Domain Overview & Use Case Links

🎓 Domain 1: Education

🏥 Domain 2: Healthcare

⚖️ Domain 3: Criminal Justice & Surveillance

🎨 Domain 4: Art & Creative Industries

🌍 Domain 5: Environment & Climate

💼 Domain 6: Labor & Workplace Analytics

📱 Domain 7: Social Media & Information Ecosystems

🏠 Domain 8: Housing & Real Estate

🌐 Domain 9: Global Supply Chains & Identity

💳 Domain 10: Finance & Commerce

🪖 Domain 11: Geopolitics & Warfare

Cross-Cutting Themes