Renewal Conference 2020

One day of the 2020 Renewal Conference at Iliff was dedicated to exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence with theological practice. ai.iliff’s Dr. Philip Butler gave one of the plenary lectures on his research and work developing distinctively black AI applications for mental health. For more information on the Seekr project mentioned in Dr. Butler’s talk, see The Seekr Project website.

Our ai.iliff team also participated in a panel discussing the ethics of AI development and deployment, held a workshop introducing people to programming in python, and invited Dr. Mohammad Mahoor, Director of Computer Vision and Social Robotics Laboratory at the University of Denver’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to share his work in the area of Socially Useful Artificial Intelligence, and, along with his students, offer some face-to-face interaction with Ryan, an AI-driven robot.

This day of the Renewal conference was generously underwritten by the Science for Seminaries project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion Program.