Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.
Joseph Priestley Award Celebration Lecture
Misinformation in the Age of AI
Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences
The intentional (disinformation) or unintentional (misinformation) spread of false information is not new, but with the advent of social media and the growth of narrowly-directed communication channels the problem has reached epidemic proportions. Prominent examples of disinformation include the intentional efforts of the tobacco industry to discount the impact of smoking on lung cancer and the campaign of the fossil fuel industry to question whether climate change is even happening and its role in warming the climate. Even misinformation can be deadly, as seen in resistance to childhood vaccines and the excess death toll during the COVID-19 pandemic caused by false rumors about the RNA vaccine. Coupled with the erosion in public trust in the efforts of our government and prominent institutions, including colleges and universities, it is difficult to craft simple solutions for the benefit of public health and safety. AI raises the stakes by making it easier to create and spread false information and more difficult to detect truth from fiction. Fortunately, there are promising approaches, but success will depend on different approaches to education, communication, and public engagement. Properly deployed, AI can be part of the solution, not just part of the problem.
The Joseph Priestley Award recipient is chosen by a different science department each year. The Department of Geosciences selected this year’s recipient. The event is supported by the Priestley Fund and is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the departments of biology, chemistry, data analytics, geosciences, environmental studies, mathematics & computer science, psychology, and physics & astronomy.
Biography (provided by the speaker)
Marcia McNutt is a geophysicist and president of the National Academy of Sciences. From 2013 to 2016, she served as editor-in-chief of the Science journals. Prior to joining Science, she was director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) from 2009 to 2013. During her tenure, the USGS responded to a number of major disasters, including earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and Japan, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. McNutt led a team of government scientists and engineers at BP headquarters in Houston who helped contain the oil and cap the well. She directed the flow rate technical group that estimated the rate of oil discharge during the spill’s active phase. For her contributions, she was awarded the U.S. Coast Guard’s Meritorious Service Medal.
Before joining the USGS, McNutt served as president and chief executive officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), in Moss Landing, California. During her time at MBARI, the institution became a leader in developing biological and chemical sensors for remote ocean deployment, installed the first deep-sea cabled observatory in U.S. waters, and advanced the integration of artificial intelligence into autonomous underwater vehicles for complex undersea missions.
From 2000 to 2002, McNutt served as president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). She was chair of the board of governors for Joint Oceanographic Institutions, responsible for operating the International Ocean Drilling Program’s vessel JOIDES Resolution and associated research programs.
McNutt began her academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and directed the Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science & Engineering, jointly offered by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Her research area is the dynamics of the upper mantle and lithosphere on geologic time scales, work that has taken her to distant continents and oceans for field observations. She is a veteran of more than a dozen deep-sea expeditions, on most of which she was chief or co-chief scientist.
McNutt received a B.A. in physics from Colorado College and her Ph.D. in earth sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She holds honorary doctoral degrees from the Colorado College, the University of Minnesota, Monmouth University, the Colorado School of Mines, University of Miami, Uppsala University, Michigan State University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, George Washington University, Boston University, Texas A&M University, Indiana University Bloomington, and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. McNutt is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, UK, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. She is a fellow of AGU, the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Association of Geodesy. In 1988, she was awarded AGU’s Macelwane Medal for research accomplishments by a young scientist, and she received the Maurice Ewing Medal in 2007 for her contributions to deep-sea exploration.
Joseph Priestley Lecture
The Joseph Priestley Award is presented by Dickinson College in memory of Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, to a distinguished scientist whose work has contributed to the welfare of humanity. The award, first presented in 1952, recognizes outstanding achievement and contribution to our understanding of science and the world.