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Our Mission

To lead human-centered AI innovation in the liberal arts through collaborative, interdisciplinary creation and responsible, ethical application.

 

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Areas of Focus

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Economics and Finance

Exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning can process large volumes of information and identify patterns to analyze market behavior and interactions among consumers, firms, and governments.

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Computational Social Sciences

Examining the human condition through artificial intelligence by gathering and analyzing data to understand human thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

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Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Genomics

Strengthening our research and preparing students to use big data to benefit fields ranging from ecology to medicine.

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The Environment and the Oceans

Providing enhanced computational resources, training, and collaborators to support Colby’s ability to keep pace with the rapidly changing tools and techniques for studying the environment.

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Ethics and Accessibility

Cultivating an interdisciplinary examination of the ethical implications of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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Arts and Humanities

Preparing future leaders in the field to think critically about a range of issues across history, culture, and societies.

DavisAI-Affiliated Publications

Chowdhury, Tahiya. “Computational Thinking with Computer Vision: Developing AI Competency in an Introductory Computer Science Course.” Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence vol 39, 2025. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.19006

Chowdhury, Tahiya and Verónica Romero. “Can We Trust Machine Learning? The Reliability of Features from Open-Source Speech Analysis Tools for Speech Modeling.” 2025. https:/doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.11072

Donaldson, Sonya. Interview by John Drabinski. “Episode 47.”  The Black Studies Podcast. 14 October 2024. https://blackstudiespodcast.substack.com/p/sonya-donaldson-department-of-african?utm_source=publication-search

Fan, Chengyu, Verónica Romero, Alexandra Paxton, and Tahiya Chowdhury. “Towards Multimodality: Comparing Quantifications of Movement Coordination.” ICMI Companion ’24: Companion Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 2024, pp. 21-25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686215.3690149

Imai, Saki, Tahiya Chowdhury, and Amanda Stent. “Evaluating Open-Source ASR Systems: Performance Across Diverse Audio Conditions and Error Correction Methods.” Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 5027-5039, 2025. https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.336/

Margolis, Micah, Anna Mackey, Isabella Kuhr, and Michael Donihue. “Generative AI in Liberal Arts Education: A Comparative Analysis of Student Experiences.” Journal of Writing With and About AI, 2025. https://www.flipsnack.com/99B9EC66AED/jwai-issue2-v2 

Martinez, José.  Prelude V1 – José Martínez (Daniel Perea and Nicolás Molina – virtual performers).” 31 July, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4IKWoZnKtU&ab_channel=Jos%C3%A9Mart%C3%ADnez

Wang, Raymond, Nicholas R. Record, Whitney D. King, and Tahiya Chowdhury. “Designing a Sustainable Marine Debris Clean-up Framework without Human Labels.” COMPASS ’24: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, 2024, pp. 211-219. https://doi.org/10.1145/3674829.3675076

Wang, Ray, Tahiya Chowdhury, and Alejandra C. Ortiz. “Semantic Segmentation Framework for Atoll Satellite Imagery: An In-depth Exploration Using UNet Variants and Segmentation Gym.” Applied Computing and Geosciences vol. 25,  2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acags.2024.100217

Chowdhury, Tahiya, Verónica Romero, and Amanda Stent. “Interactional coordination between conversation part­ners with autism using non-verbal cues in dialogues.” Proceedings of the First Workshop on Connecting Multiple Disciplines to AI Techniques in Interaction-centric Autism Research and Diagnosis (ICARD 2023). 2023.

Chowdhury, Tahiya, Verónica Romero, and Amanda Stent. “Parameter Selection for Analyzing Conversations with Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Proceedings of INTERSPEECH. 2023.

Al Madi, Naser. “How readable is model-generated code? examining readability and visual inspection of github co­pilot.” Proceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. 2022.

Paxton, Alexandra, Tahiya Chowdhury, and Verónica Romero. “Language in the Time of COVID: Sensitivity of Lin­guistic Alignment to Conversation Type and Communication Modality.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Vol. 45. No. 45. 2023.

Raczaszek-Leonardi, Joanna, et al. “Putting interaction center-stage for the study of knowledge structures and processes.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Vol. 45. No. 45. 2023.

Good, Aidan, et al. “Recall distortion in neural network pruning and the undecayed pruning algorithm.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (2022): 32762-32776.

Maus, Natalie, and Oliver W. Layton. “Estimating heading from optic flow: Comparing deep learning network and human performance.” Neural Networks 154 (2022): 383-396.

Stent, A., Mann, G., & Kambadur, P. (2023). NLP in Finance. In Machine Learning and Data Sciences for Financial Markets: A Guide to Contemporary Practices (pp. 563–592). chapter, Cambridge University Press.

Good, A., Lin, J., Sieg, H., Fergurson, M., Yu, X., Zhe, S., Wieczorek, J., & Serra, T. (2022). Recall distortion in neural network pruning and the undecayed pruning algorithm. In Proc. NeurIPS. arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02976.

Al Madi, N. (2022) How readable is model-generated code? Examining readability and visual inspection of GitHub Copilot. To appear in Proceedings of ASE 2022.

Li, Y., Li, C., Chen, J., & Roinou, C. (2022) Energy-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning for collaborative execution in mission-oriented drone networks. In Proceedings of IEEE ICCCN.

Layton, O. W., & Fajen, B. R. (2022). Distributed encoding of curvilinear self-motion across spiral optic flow patterns. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 1-15. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-16371-4

Maus, N., & Layton, O. W. (2022). Estimating heading from optic flow: Comparing deep learning network and human performance. Neural Networks, 154, 383-396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2022.07.007

Layton, O. W., Powell, N., Steinmetz, S. T., & Fajen, B. R. (2022). Estimating curvilinear self-motion from optic flow with a biologically inspired neural system. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 17(4), 046013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35580573/

Steinmetz, S. T., Layton, O. W., Powell, N. V., & Fajen, B. R. (2022). A Dynamic Efficient Sensory Encoding Approach to Adaptive Tuning in Neural Models of Optic Flow Processing. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 16. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35431848/*

Press Coverage

For media inquiries, please contact George Sopko at [email protected].

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Made Possible by the Davis Family

Made possible by the tremendous generosity of the Davis family and trustee of its charitable foundation Andrew Davis ’85, LL.D. ’15, the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence will provide new pathways for talented students and faculty to research, create, and apply AI and machine learning (ML) across disciplines while setting a precedent for how liberal arts colleges can shape the future of AI.

For decades the Davis family, through The Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund, has contributed generously to the evolution of the academic and cocurricular experience at Colby, and the Davis Institute builds on this tradition of leadership. With Andrew Davis’s support, his family provided a $25-million gift in 2017 to create DavisConnects, Colby’s innovative model for post-graduate success, as well as a $10-million lead gift in 2013 to construct the Davis Science Center on Colby’s campus. In 2000 the Davis family selected Colby as one of five partner institutions to pilot the Davis United World College Scholars Program (UWC), which funded UWC graduates’ attendance at Colby and continues to make a profound impact at the College.