Bill Tomlinson

Professor of Informatics UC Irvine

  • Irvine CA

Bill Tomlinson studies artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and computer-supported learning.

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Biography

Bill Tomlinson is a Professor of Informatics and Education at the University of California, Irvine, and a researcher in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. He studies the fields of artificial intelligence, ICT for sustainability, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported learning. His book Greening through IT (MIT Press, 2010) examines the ways in which information technology can help people think and act on the broad scales of time, space, and complexity necessary for us to address the world's current environmental issues. In addition, he has authored more than 100 publications across a range of journals, conferences, and other venues in computing, the learning sciences, sustainability, design, and the law. His work has been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Wired.com, Scientific American Frontiers, CNN, and the BBC. In 2007, he received an NSF CAREER award, and in 2008 he was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow. From 2014-2017, he served on the EPA's Board of Scientific Counselors, Sustainable and Healthy Communities subcommittee. He holds an A.B. in Biology from Harvard College, an M.F.A. in Experimental Animation from CalArts, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT.

Areas of Expertise

Computer Games & Virtual Worlds
Environmental Informatics
Human-Computer Interaction
Computer-Supported Learning
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Accomplishments

UC Online Award

2023-2024

UCI CORCL Award

2019-2020

UCI ICS Research Award

2019-2020

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Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ph.D.

Media Arts and Sciences

2002

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

S.M.

Media Arts and Sciences

1999

California Institute of the Arts

M.F.A.

Experimental Animation

1996

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Media Appearances

A free California? Trump visits as initiative to leave U.S. cleared to gather signatures

USA Today  online

2025-01-24

In the past decade there have been at least three major attempts at enable California to secede, according to the paper by Torrance and Bill Tomlinson of the University of California, Irvine.

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UC Irvine researcher authors ‘scientists' warning' on climate and technology

UCI News  online

2024-02-14

Bill Tomlinson, UCI professor of informatics and co-author of a recently issued ‘scientists’ warning’ on climate change and technology, says that new clean energy innovations and AI, broadly applied across a swath of human activities, could offer a pathway to dramatic reductions in carbon emissions and other environmental harms.

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How much energy does AI use compared to humans? Surprising study ignites controversy

VentureBeat  online

2023-09-22

In an interview with VentureBeat, the authors of the paper, University of California at Irvine professors Bill Tomlinson and Don Patterson, and MIT Sloan School of Management visiting scientist Andrew Torrance, offered some insight into what they were hoping to measure.

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Event Appearances

Nobody Expects the Data Inquisition - Our Chief Weapon is AI’s!

2025 | Southern California International Law Journal Symposium  

Law for a Finite Planet

2025 | Southern California International Law Journal Symposium  

AI for Academic Research

2024 | SubTech unconference on law and AI, Northwestern Law School  

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Research Grants

AI-Enhanced Personalization for Large-Scale University Education 2024-2027 in Sustainability Science

NSF RITEL Award

2024-2027

Probabilistic Knowledge Graph and Automated Ontology Generation

Accenture LLP

2023-2024

Probabilistic Knowledge Graph

Accenture LLP

2022-2023

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Articles

Disparities in the impact of drought on agriculture across countries

Scientific Reports

Hayden Freedman, Amir AghaKouchak, Angela J Rigden, André van der Hoek, Bill Tomlinson

2025

Over the last several decades, droughts driven by climate change have damaged agricultural production as the planet warms. It is crucial for the future of the global food supply to develop effective adaptation strategies. However, not all countries and regions are affected equally by drought. We fit a hierarchical Bayesian model with a dataset containing 60 years of country-level drought and agricultural productivity data to probabilistically identify the susceptibility of various countries and regions to drought. We find that regions such as Eastern Africa and Southern Asia are highly susceptible to drought, with each region exhibiting a >90% chance that drought has negatively affected agriculture, leading to estimated historical agricultural losses of >14%, while Eastern Asia is the most drought-resilient region, with only a 44% probability that drought has negatively affected agriculture in this region.

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University students describe how they adopt AI for writing and research in a general education course

Scientific Reports

Rebecca W Black, Bill Tomlinson

2025

University students have begun to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in many different ways in their undergraduate education, some beneficial to their learning, and some simply expedient to completing assignments with as little work as possible. This exploratory qualitative study examines how undergraduate students used AI in a large General Education course on sustainability and technology at a research university in the United States in 2023. Thirty-nine students documented their use of AI in their final course project, which involved analyzing conceptual networks connecting core sustainability concepts. Through iterative qualitative coding, we identified key patterns in students’ AI use, including higher-order writing tasks (understanding complex topics, finding evidence), lower-order writing tasks (revising, editing, proofreading), and other learning activities (efficiency enhancement, independent research).

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The Law and AI as "Apex Collaborator": Legal Frameworks for Optimized Cooperation

FIU Law Review

David S Filippi, Bill Tomlinson, Andrew W Torrance

2025

Law fundamentally exists to enable human cooperation, providing frameworks for everything from basic contracts to complex international agreements. As artificial intelligence systems grow more sophisticated, they may enable new ways that collaborative activity can occur. We posit the possibility of a new kind of AI entity: the “Apex Collaborator”, a computational system with capabilities for cooperation and partnership that are superior, in at least some ways, to those of humans. Just as apex predators shape the ecosystems in which they live through predation, Apex Collaborators would shape human-AI networks through their ability to enhance peaceful coexistence, collective problem-solving, and shared decision-making.“AI as an Apex Collaborator” flips the normal scripts of “AI as danger” or “AI as passive deliverer of benefits to humans”, instead conceiving of AI as a catalyst and enabler capable of lifting human abilities to cooperate above their evolutionary trajectory.

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