On Wednesday, Penn’s Office of the Provost hosted its annual Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow Lecture titled “Preparing for Next Generation AI,” which discussed how artificial intelligence can be adapted for more effective use in today’s society.
The lecture was presented by, Patricia Brennan, the Provost’s Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow in the School of Nursing for 2024-25, who received a Master of Science in Nursing from Penn in 1979. In the lecture, Brennan examined the role that artificial intelligence can play in society.
“I believe if we can think about AI infused by shape and responsive to culture, context, and characteristics, we have the chance of keeping the promise that people hold and value,” she said.
Brennan also addressed the implementation process for AI in the lecture, stating that it is important to integrate the arts and social sciences.
“We bring these lessons from arts and social sciences to better understand cultural aspects, better understand contextual features, and better understand the characteristics of the users and the designers and the problem,” she added.
The Office of the Provost annually selects an academic figure “whose work promotes civic engagement, scholarly innovation and inclusive communities” to serve as its Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow.
Brennan previously served as the Director of the National Library of Medicine from 2016 to 2023. She was the first woman, nurse, and industrial engineer to hold the position.
To The Daily Pennsylvanian, Brennan elaborated on her vision for “the next generation” of AI. She advocated for AI not to be technology-driven, but rather focused on the people and the problems in order to develop better solutions for those problems.
She emphasized that AI problems should "understand the person who’s involved, should understand the data, some issues about representativeness, their gender, their age, and their capacities," and gave the example of helping people who are deaf to communicate as a way to incorporate AI into patient care.
“AI models right now are often driven by large data sets that don't include enough information about the phenomena,” Brennan said. “The developer has to understand — where is that algorithm going to be used if it’s going to be driven towards clinical care? That is AI to help nurses and doctors make better decisions.”
George Demiris, Penn Integrates Knowledge professor in the School of Nursing and Perelman School of Medicine, added that AI has a significant function to serve in patient care.
“A lot of the AI tools that are now being introduced are supposed to make things easier, whether it’s documentation or capturing clinical notes, so AI could have the potential to allow nurses to redesign their workflow, to be more patient-centered, to spend less time on administrative tasks, and could also facilitate decision making and provide decision support based on data that would allow nurses to make more informed decisions," Demiris said.
Demiris also emphasized that the application of AI in patient care must remain ethical.
“We need to recognize that healthcare is unique,” he added. “So in healthcare, I do think we need to define when it is critical to have that human oversight, and also to ensure that we are informing patients of all the different data that are being used and also what systems they may be interacting with.”
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