Ending Poverty, Classroom Tools and Job Algorithms

The Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good gathered for its fourth year at the Robert H. Smith School of Business to bring academic and industry experts together to explore the impact of analytics in nonprofit organizations, government entities and social impact organizations. The event was hosted on May 2, 2025, by the Decision, Operations and Information Technologies (DO&IT) Department.

Associate Professor Margrét Bjarnadóttir said the event has grown each year, with nearly 100 registrants in 2025. “This year, the topics ranged from optimal wildfire containment strategies and algorithmic fairness to health messaging and ending poverty. And of course AI,” Bjarnadóttir said. She added that AI as a classroom tool was also discussed and the impact of AI on jobs and algorithmic fairness.

Bjarnadóttir and Jui Ramaprasad, associate professor of Information Systems, have been co-organizers of the event since its beginning. Hamsa Bastani, from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been a part of the organizing committee for the past three years. New this year to the organizing team from Smith are John Silberholz and Jessica Clark. Clark was also a speaker at the event, discussing her research on empathy priming for data labeling, which her work demonstrates is critical in training models to identify “perspective-sensitive” content – e.g., sexist phrases.

This year’s workshop had 17 speakers, including those from Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, MIT, Berkeley, NYU, University of Illinois, University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and of course the Smith School.

Since the 2024 workshop, Bjarnadóttir noted some new trends and topics in the AI space, including an increase in the use of AI “as an analysis tool to extract insights often from large text corpora,” she said. “For example, this year we saw AI used to understand stereotypes in children's books—and it was eye-opening to see word associations with different gendered characters - boy characters are still heavily associated with guns and generals.”