Bill Tomlinson
Professor of Informatics UC Irvine
- Irvine CA
Bill Tomlinson studies artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and computer-supported learning.
Media
Social
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Celebration of Teaching School Honoree Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, UCI
2012
UCI Instructional Technology Innovation Award
2015
UCI ICS Research Award
2019-2020
UCI CORCL Award
2019-2020
UC Online Award
2023-2024
Education
Harvard College
A.B.
General Studies, Biology Concentration
1994
California Institute of the Arts
M.F.A.
Experimental Animation
1996
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
S.M.
Media Arts and Sciences
1999
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D.
Media Arts and Sciences
2002
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.
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.
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.
People are building technology that could survive the apocalypse
Fast Company online
2019-11-08
If computing resources become more scarce and networks fracture, even deciding what information to store could become an important question, potentially leading to scenarios such as communities dividing up pieces of resources like Wikipedia to try to preserve it across computers, says Bill Tomlinson, a professor and vice chair of the Department of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine.
Using Snowflake to Access and Combine Multiple Datasets Hosted by the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative
AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog online
2022-04-07
In his book, Greening Through IT, sustainability professor Bill Tomlinson writes that a fundamental challenge with how humans understand and act on environmental issues is that humans are not naturally equipped to operate at the scales of time, space, and complexity that these issues exist.
Event Appearances
Developing student systems thinking and increasing engagement using ZotGraph
2024 | Earth Educators' Rendezvous Philadelphia, PA
ZotGraph: Engaging Students with Complex Topics through Knowledge Graphs
2024 | AAAS-NSF IUSE Summit Washington, DC
AI for Academic Research
2024 | SubTech unconference on law and AI, Northwestern Law School
Law for a Finite Planet
2025 | Southern California International Law Journal Symposium
Nobody Expects the Data Inquisition - Our Chief Weapon is AI’s!
2025 | Southern California International Law Journal Symposium
Research Grants
The Pathway to Academic Success
US Department of Education
2014-2018
Improving General Education Sustainability Science: A Pilot Study in 2021-2024 Engaging Students with Complex Topics through Knowledge Graphs
NSF IUSE Award
2021-2024
Probabilistic Knowledge Graph
Accenture LLP
2022-2023
Probabilistic Knowledge Graph and Automated Ontology Generation
Accenture LLP
2023-2024
AI-Enhanced Personalization for Large-Scale University Education 2024-2027 in Sustainability Science
NSF RITEL Award
2024-2027
Articles
Organic Websites: Certification of AI-Generated or Human-Written Content on the Internet
Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual PropertyAndrew W Torrance, Bill Tomlinson
2025
This paper proposes the development of a certification system analogous to the standards used in organic food labeling, designed to distinguish websites based on the proportion of human-written versus AI-generated content. In an era where Al plays an increasingly prominent role in content creation, this system would provide transparency for consumers and uphold fair competition in digital markets. The certification would allow website creators to present verifiable evidence of their content's provenance, ranging from entirely human-made, to a mix of human and Al contributions, to fully AI-generated content. Additionally, this paper explores the legal and policy frameworks necessary for implementing such a system, drawing on principles from trademark law, unfair advertising, and competition law. It also considers the potential administrative structures for the certification process,
Agents in a Tangled Bank: An Ecosystem Approach to AI Regulation
FIU Law ReviewAndrew W Torrance, Bill Tomlinson
2025
As autonomous artificial intelligence agents (" Agents") become increasingly prevalent in society, legal frameworks must evolve to govern their behavior effectively. This article argues that autonomous AI agents must be understood as operating within complex ecosystems of other agents, humans, institutions, and actual biological ecosystems-similar to how biological organisms exist within broader ecosystems. Drawing on established research in multi-agent systems and environmental law, we propose that effective governance of AI agents requires moving beyond just regulation on individual agents to include system-level approaches. We examine how existing legal frameworks handle heterogeneous autonomous entities (humans, corporations, and animals) and explore how these frameworks might extend to AI agent ecosystems.
The Law and AI as "Apex Collaborator": Legal Frameworks for Optimized Cooperation
FIU Law ReviewDavid 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.
University students describe how they adopt AI for writing and research in a general education course
Scientific ReportsRebecca 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).
Disparities in the impact of drought on agriculture across countries
Scientific ReportsHayden 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.
