Artificial Intelligence

George Mason University officially opened its Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center, a collaborative space where students will perform research on a variety of emerging fields related to artificial intelligence and autonomous devices.

Melissa Perry, dean of Mason’s College of Public Health, is an ardent proponent of virtual reality as a tool to help solve the nation’s health challenges. But she also worries that technology has helped create an “epidemic of loneliness” that has heightened the importance of a shared humanity and “being present for each other.”

Foteini Baldimtsi, an assistant professor in Mason’s Department of Computer Science, and James Casey, an associate professor in Mason’s Computer Game Design program, help us understand what the metaverse is, or will be, and how the volatile world of cryptocurrency fits in.

Missy Cummings, one of the country’s first female fighter pilots and the director of Mason’s autonomy and robotics center, calls herself a tech futurist, charged with making tech work and helping it get better. She isn’t shy about calling out bad tech either, including the vision systems in self-driving cars and Tesla’s Autopilot.

Research Interests: HCI, VR/AR

Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, stochastic optimization, machine learning, deep learning, optimization for deep learning, generative models, language models, bioinformatics, computational biophysics