Faculty to offer two interdisciplinary courses on AI, computing, and society

As the influence of artificial intelligence, sophisticated algorithms, and enormous datasets on science and culture grows, Yale students and scholars at Yale are eager to participate in – and shape – debates around emerging technologies. Two new course offerings will allow them to do just that.

In Fall 2025, Yale College will offer two new cross-divisional, co-taught courses: Topics in Critical Computing, which will introduce students to the social, cultural, and political context of modern computing technology; and AI, Medicine, and Society, which will allow students to explore a broad range of issues related to the use of artificial intelligence in medicine.

These courses are part of an ongoing initiative to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration and curricular innovation that began in 2020. Every year, Yale College, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering & Applied Science have invited faculty to propose innovative course offerings designed to cut across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. These courses afford Yale faculty the opportunity to co-teach on timely topics with peers in dramatically different fields, and to experiment with novel course ideas that may inform future teaching, research, and collaborations.  

These unique, often one-time course offerings also afford students the opportunity to see how academics can – and frequently do – collaborate well beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.  

Julián Posada, Assistant Professor of American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will teach Topics in Critical Computing (AMST/CPSC 2265) alongside Theodore Kim, Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering & Applied Science. “The subject of computation in society is inherently interdisciplinary,” Posada and Kim said of the course, which will explore topics including algorithms, biases in datasets, fears and possibilities around AI, and more. “We thought it would be an excellent idea to have a computer scientist and a humanities and social science scholar in dialogue to offer this course.”

Posada and Kim also plan to invite other Yale faculty members from anthropology, law, digital humanities, and more to the course as guest lecturers, connecting students with even more varied perspectives on computing and its impact on society.  

The other cross-divisional course to be offered in 2025-26, AI, Medicine, and Society (SOCY/BENG 2048a), will be co-taught by Alka Menon, Assistant Professor of Sociology in the FAS, and Xenophon Papademetris, Professor of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science, Radiology & Biomedical Imaging (Yale School of Medicine), and Biomedical Engineering (SEAS). “Our goal for the course is to lay a foundational set of knowledge about topics on AI that can prepare students who may be seeing these debates in public to engage with them critically,” said Menon. “Many discussions about AI have more to do with science fiction and reality,” added Papademetris, “so we want them to know what the real issues are so they can talk about them and be educated participants in what will be the key public debate over the next ten years.”

‘Modeling interdisciplinary communication’

These special courses are not just unique offerings for students. They give faculty the chance to try out innovative curriculum ideas and to connect more deeply with colleagues pursuing related research interests in different pockets of campus.  

“Yale conducts amazing research related to the social aspects of computation in all disciplines,” said Posada and Kim. “This includes humanities scholars looking at its history and ethics, social scientists examining its economic impacts or political implications, and computer scientists exploring issues of fairness in algorithms, with all schools—from law to medicine and the environment—also conducting research on the topic.”  

The pair are looking forward to learning from each other as much as from their students. For Posada, the research Kim’s lab has been conducting on Black representation in computer graphics is particularly interesting. On Kim’s part, he would like to learn “as much as he can about Prof. Posada’s work on how data and computation rearrange power outside of the usual North American and European sites traditionally covered in the CS curriculum.”

For Menon and Papademetris, their course grew organically out of a research collaboration they’ve been working on since 2021. A grant from the National Science Foundation, which has resulted in several academic papers and will eventually culminate in a book about medical AI, has allowed Menon, Papademetris, and two other collaborators to focus on the challenges of understanding deep learning AI models.  

Because users can’t yet fully understand how these models make their predictions, their research team has been investigating and communicating what medical practitioners need to know to use these models, and how to explain models’ decisions to patients and other stakeholders in medical settings.

Menon and Papademetris plan to alternate lectures, providing perspectives from interpretive social sciences one week and engineering the next. They emphasized the need to develop a shared vocabulary across the social and medical sciences, and to help students understand the use of AI in medicine with specific case studies that will help them understand larger questions about transparency, risk tolerance, and safety.

There will also be plentiful discussion time and a history component to the class, says Papademetris; in many ways, questions about the use of AI in medical settings are merely new versions of the same questions the medical world constantly grapples with.

Yale College and the FAS also provide co-teachers with course development funds for each course, to be used for exciting hands-on course elements or research that serves curriculum development. Posada and Kim plan to incorporate a special trip into their curriculum thanks to this support: students will visit the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, MA.  

The high-performance computing facility is a joint venture between Yale, Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts. It was also the first university research data center to receive a LEED Platinum Certification for its attention to energy efficiency and low environmental impact – topics Posada and Kim plan to discuss with students and peers.  

“This will be a unique opportunity for students to encounter firsthand some of the critical infrastructure that makes so many of our daily-use products and computing research possible,” they said. The visit will be the “epicenter of seminar discussions on the impacts and mitigation of computing technology on the environment and the communities where these data centers are located.”

Both courses should provide students with ample opportunities to engage with peers, scholars, and perspectives outside of their disciplines.  

“We want to encourage students who think at first glance, ‘oh, this is not for me, there's deep learning on the syllabus,’ to take a second look,” said Menon. “We are encouraging students from different interdisciplinary backgrounds to come together here, and we will build a shared knowledge base and vocabulary. You don’t need to know something to get in the door – we want to build that.”