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The rules are set, the date is locked in and the political world will be watching as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris face off for the first time at the presidential debate taking place in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
It's expected millions will tune in, but if you're a reporter covering the lead up to this much hyped event - then let our experts help with your coverage.
Tony Smith’s knowledge of politics covers a large spectrum that includes Constitutional Law, the intricate workings and rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court, election law, and the contest over rights in both a domestic and global context. Louis DeSipio examines how democratic nations incorporate new members, including policymaking in the areas of immigration and voting rights. He also studies Latino political behavior. Louis DeSipio and Tony Smith can help with various angles of any political story you're assigned. Both experts are available to speak with media - simply click on either expert's icon now to arrange an interview today.
Irvine, Calif., Aug. 26, 2024 — Beall Applied Innovation at the University of California, Irvine has announced the launch of NarrA.I.tive, a groundbreaking initiative that blends the university’s academic strengths with the global entertainment industry and the innovative spirit of Orange County to harness artificial intelligence as a force for good across creative industries.
“As AI’s influence expands, the opportunity and responsibility to steer it in positive directions is crucial,” said Errol Arkilic, UC Irvine’s chief innovation officer. “Through NarrA.I.tive, we redirect doom-and-gloom scripts to scripts of inspiration, education and enthusiastic support for creators as artificial intelligence increasingly influences the industry.” NarrA.I.tive’s action plan includes establishing UC Irvine and Orange County as global leaders in reshaping the artistic and technological ecosystem surrounding storytelling, attracting partners and collaborators to support the state-of-the-art initiative, creating revenue-generating content and tools, unifying academic excellence with emerging content production methods, and developing a structure for efficient project execution and student involvement.
Supporting NarrA.I.tive’s impact, Beall Applied Innovation has established a strategic collaboration with Apples and Oranges Arts, an Orange County-based nonprofit entertainment and education studio co-founded by UC Irvine alumnus Tim Kashani ’86, MBA ’88, and his wife, actress Pamela Winslow Kashani. Started in 2008, Apples and Oranges Arts empowers storytellers to become creative entrepreneurs by combining educational platforms, technological integration, and a thriving community of new and existing voices.
“Through NarrA.I.tive, we blend the magic of storytelling with the power of technologies such as artificial intelligence and extended reality, creating narratives that touch hearts and minds in ways previously unimaginable,” Tim Kashani said. “This collaboration marks a new era of creativity and technology alignment that requires ethical stewardship placing the human front and center.” In July, Apples and Oranges Arts and Beall Applied Innovation finalized plans for the NarrA.I.tive Story Studio, to be located at the Cove@UCI in the campus’s Research Park. Apples and Oranges Arts will lead the studio’s charge through training in new technologies that drive the entertainment industry’s future and through collaboration with UC Irvine schools, involving students and faculty in tool development and content production.
“We invite storytellers, technologists, philanthropists, investors and the global community to join us in reshaping the future of storytelling,” said Stuart Mathews, director of industry alliances at Beall Applied Innovation. “Together, we will explore the expanding possibilities that AI and technology bring to the narrative arts, redefining how stories inspire, entertain and elevate the human experience.” About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UC Irvine has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UC Irvine, visit www.uci.edu. Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus studio with a Comrex IP audio codec to interview UC Irvine faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UC Irvine news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at https://news.uci.edu/media-resources.
How do our brains take in complex information from the world around us to help us make decisions? And what happens when there’s a mismatch between how well your brain thinks it’s performing this function and how well it’s actually doing? UC Irvine cognitive scientist Megan Peters takes a deep dive into metacognition - our ability to monitor our own cognitive processing. To reach Prof. Peters, contact Heather Ashbach at hashbach@uci.edu or 949-284-1577.
“Our brains are fantastically powerful information processing systems. They take in information from the world around us through our eyes, ears, and other senses, and they process or transform that sensory information into rich internal representations — representations that we can then use to make useful decisions, to navigate effectively without running into things, and ultimately, to stay alive. And interestingly, our brains also can tell us when they’re doing a good job with all this processing, through a process called metacognition, or our ability to monitor our own cognitive processing.
My name is Megan Peters, and I’m an associate professor in the department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine. I’m also a Fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Brain, Mind, & Consciousness program and I am president and chair of the board at Neuromatch.
My research seeks to understand metacognition — how it works in the brain, and how it works at a computational or algorithm level — and it also seeks to understand what this metacognitive processing might have to do with the conscious experiences we have of our environments, of each other, and of ourselves. So in our research group, we use a combination of behavioral experiments with humans, brain imaging (like MRI scans), and computational approaches like mathematical modeling and machine learning or Artificial Intelligence, to try to unravel these mysteries.
I think my favorite overall line of research right now has to do with cases where our brains’ self-monitoring sometimes seems to go wrong. So what I mean is, sometimes your brain “metacognitively” computes how well it thinks you’re doing at this “sensory information processing” task, but this ends up being completely different from how well you’re actually doing. Imagine it this way: you’re driving down a foggy road, at night in the dark. You probably can’t see very well, and you’d hope that your brain would also be able to tell you, “I can’t see super well right now, I should probably slow down.” And most of the time, your brain does this self-monitoring correctly, and you do slow down. But sometimes, under some kinds of conditions or visual information, your brain miscalculates, and it erroneously tells you, “Actually you can see just fine right now!”
So this is a sort of “metacognitive illusion”: your brain is telling you “you’re doing great, you can see very clearly!” when in reality, the quality of the information that it’s receiving, and the processing it’s doing, is really poor, really bad — in essence, that means that you can feel totally confident in your abilities to accurately process the world around you, when in fact you’re interpreting the world totally incorrectly.
Now normally, in everyday life, this doesn’t happen of course. But we can create conditions in the lab where this happens very robustly, which helps us understand when and how it might happen in the real world, too, and what the consequences might be. So this is fascinating both because it is a powerful tool for studying how your brain constructs that metacognitive feeling of confidence, and also because — in theory — it means that your subjective, conscious feeling of confidence might be doing something really different than just automatically or directly reading out how reliably you brain is processing information. And that could eventually provide a better way to investigate how our so-called phenomenological or conscious experiences can arise from activity patterns in your brain at all.”
To reach Prof. Peters, contact Heather Ashbach at hashbach@uci.edu or 949-284-1577.
