Centering humans in AI education might be key to innovation and research

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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (0:31)
USC wants to put AI at the center of education and humans at the center of AI. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.
What do the physics of beatboxing have to do with artificial intelligence? Well, at the University of Southern California, it's all part of a blueprint for keeping the technology human-centered.

**Shri Narayanan** (1:10)
Can you believe that the human vocal instrument can provide this, make this sound? So what you're seeing here is, you know, it's a cross-section of a person's head. You can see the tongue, the lips, the airway, trachea.
So there's all machine learning.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (1:27)
That's Professor Shri Narayanan. He runs USC's Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab, or SAIL, and he's showing me real-time MRI videos of beatboxers mapped by machine learning algorithms. Not just to understand musical performance, but how vocalization functions, or what goes wrong when it doesn't.
Narayanan researches behavioral signal processing, using AI to analyze physical patterns in humans to tackle profound clinical challenges, from mapping neurodevelopment and autism, to identifying early biomarkers for depression.

**Shri Narayanan** (2:06)
Words kind of tell something about my intent, my emotions, the context, who I am. Machines try to do that, right? Behavioral signal processing essentially looks at that.
But more than that, it's interested in what happens if there are changes in these systems that generate that, right? To communicate, right?

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (2:23)
This isn't the buzzy AI of chatbots or coding agents that have been all the rage. But research like this is at the core of a $200 million bet USC is making about what a university can still offer in the age of AI.
The new Stevens School for Computing and Artificial Intelligence is pushing to embed the technology across the campus. It's launching a new AI major this fall and minors designed for non-STEM students to apply AI to disciplines like history and art. Gaurav Sukhatme leads the new school. He says higher education has to evolve constantly to stay ahead of technology.

**Gaurav Sukhatme** (3:04)
We have a very project-driven curriculum, which allows us to refresh the projects that the students do as part of their degree programs and we keep changing those projects and updating them. So as new topics are born and created, new elective courses spring up much faster than in a more traditional curriculum.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (3:23)
But innovation in this AI era has largely been driven by industry players, with deep enough pockets to fund the large-scale computing power today's models run on. So what can academia offer?

**Gaurav Sukhatme** (3:37)
One of the things the university is really good at is posing questions about, not about what's happening today, but about what might happen a decade from now, five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now, which may not always be tied to having access to the latest compute, but it is having the freedom to think about entirely new ways of doing things.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (4:01)
As institutions like USC rush to bend every discipline towards AI, he says the ethics of these systems must remain core to the curriculum. We'll be right back.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:15)
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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (5:19)
You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.