The Academic Minute for 2025.02.24-2025.02.28

The Academic Minute from 2.24 – 2.28

Monday
Erik Van Aken – Rocky Mountain College
Chaos and Cause
Erik Van Aken is Instructor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Rocky Mountain College. His research focuses on the metaphysics of causality, scientific methodology, and debates on objectivity.

Tuesday
Ann Kronrod – University of Massachusetts Lowell
What Can We Learn From Exploring The Language of Product Reviews?
Ann Kronrod is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She earned her Ph.D. in Marketing and Cognitive Science of Language from Tel Aviv University, and later completed her education as a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT, Sloan School of Management. Prior to joining UMass Lowell, Ann Kronrod was an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, and then Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and at Boston University. Ann Kronrod is a marketing researcher with extensive background in linguistics. Her research interests span a wide variety of subjects that can be categorized as marketing communication, consumer behavior, word-of-mouth and pro-social marketing. She often integrates her knowledge of linguistics in her research.

Wednesday
Amanda Kennell – University of Notre Dame
Understanding Who Godzilla Really Is
Amanda Kennell, Ph.D. researches Japanese media to help us understand the modern media environment, including in particular new technologies and the popular media that blanket the average person’s daily life. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation (2023), uses Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels to describe how the Japanese media ecosystem works today.  She is currently working on a book about how popular media affect the way we interact with the environment. Dr. Kennell’s work has been published by the British Museum, the International Journal of Comic Arts, the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, the Journal of Popular Culture, The Conversation, and The Washington Post, among others.

Thursday
Samantha Keppler – University of Michigan
Teacher Experiences With New AI
Samantha Keppler is the NBD Bancorp Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Her expertise is in education operations, or the mechanics of teaching and learning. Her work focuses on teacher resourcefulness, or how teachers find and create resources in innovative and unexpected ways. Recently, her research focuses on technologies such as teacher crowdfunding platforms and generative AI tools. She earned her PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Science from the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she was a public high school math teacher for three years in the Bronx, New York.

Friday
John Beverly – University at Buffalo
Solitude, Transcendence, and Healthy Aging Through the Lens of Artificial Intelligence
Dr. Beverley’s work is at the intersection of ontology engineering, formal logic, and ethics. Alongside his affiliations, Dr. Beverley is the co-lead developer for the Basic Formal Ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2), a common language used by over 700 knowledge representation projects, such as the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) and Industrial Ontologies Foundry. Dr. Beverley has worked with numerous groups curating, creating, and applying knowledge representation artifacts to semantic interoperability challenges, supporting efforts to identify vaccine and drug treatment options for COVID-19, updating the widely-used Infectious Disease Ontology, developing the Virus Infectious Disease Ontology extension, and developing the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology which extends from it. He has additionally developed the Occupation Ontology – which represents codes for international occupational standards – and created the first Large-Language Model Bias Ontology.