Rao Speaks on AI in While in London

Rao speaks about AI with prep school students in London

Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Digital Studies Anand Rao spoke at the TechEx Global event as part of the AI & Big Data Expo in Olympia, London last week. At the conference Rao chaired a panel discussion called “Getting to Production-Ready: Challenges and Best Practices for Deploying AI.” The panel was on Feb 5, 2025, and included panelists from Experian, Wolfram, Pfizer and Open University. TechEx advertised the session as a standout panel with a SRO audience.

In addition, a student at Latymer Upper School (a prep school in the UK; recently celebrating its 400^th anniversary) attended the panel at the Expo and invited Rao to speak to her school’s AI club. She recently founded the club and was awarded a grant from the Royal Society to support the club’s work on a chatbot for their school. Rao met with the club for an hour and gave a presentation about AI in education. He said, “It was a fun group of students to talk to with lots of great questions.”

Also while in London, Rao was invited to speak on the “Regulating AI” podcast in an episode entitled “Role of Augmented Debate Learning & AI Pluralism in Education.” In the episode innovative approaches to preparing students for an AI-driven world through debate-based learning and AI pluralism were explored.

In the podcast Rao shared insights on 1) Augmented Debate-Centered Instruction – a transformative model that uses debate to develop essential skills like critical thinking, collaboration, and research; 2) AI Pluralism – a novel approach promoting diversity in AI agents to improve transparency, contestability, and bias mitigation. The episode uncovered how integrating these strategies can enhance education, foster critical thinking, and address key challenges in AI development. See the episode.