Cardinal Perspectives with Senior Vice Provost for Research H. Joseph Yost, Dean J. Steven Brown, and Professor Hanseok Ko

Genevieve Montgomery
Welcome to this episode of Cardinal Perspectives, a series featuring in-depth conversations with alumni, students, faculty, staff, and the extended family and community of The Catholic University of America.

Today we are featuring a conversation with Joseph Yost, Ph.D., senior vice provost for research; J. Steven Brown, Ph.D., interim dean for the College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing; Hanseok Ko, Professor Newton Bennett Endowed Chair of Engineering; And William Roth, senior associate vice president for University Advancement.

Joseph Yost is a world-renowned scientist appointed senior vice provost for research at Catholic University in 2024, where he leads efforts to expand research capabilities and build upon the University's recent Carnegie R1 status achievement. His research focuses on genetics and disease-causing mutations, particularly congenital heart disease and rare pediatric diseases. Dr. Yost is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Steven Brown serves as senior vice provost and interim dean for the College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1991 and joined Catholic University in 1998 where he has served in various leadership roles, including dean of graduate studies. Dr. Brown is a fellow of ASHRAE and has conducted research for NIST, NASA, and Ford Motor Company.

Hanseok Ko is professor and Newton-Bennett Endowed Chair of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from Catholic University in 1992 and is returning to the University following two decades at Korea University and twelve years with the U.S. Department of Defense. Internationally recognized for signal processing and intelligent systems, Dr. Ko developed technologies for Hyundai/Kia Motors and Samsung, and directs the Multimodal AI Laboratory. He has authored over 700 publications and holds 83 patents.

We are excited for you to hear this engaging conversation about research, engineering and innovation at Catholic University.

William Roth
Good afternoon. My name is William Roth. I'm the associate vice president for University Advancement here at Catholic University. I am greatly honored and privileged to be with several individuals who are serving as the true backbone for what we are trying to achieve here at the University in the space of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

We are going to have a thorough conversation about different aspects of this space from a university level, from a college level, and from what you might find in the classroom and in the research labs.

I am very grateful to have Dr. Joseph Yost, who is the senior vice provost for research here at the University. I have Dr. Steven Brown, who is the Dean of the College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing. And Dr. Hanseok Ko, who is a professor of engineering here, working in our computer science and our electrical engineering space. He’s also the newly minted Newton-Bennett Chair of Engineering, endowed very recently and named such in April of this year.

So gentlemen, thank you for joining us and talking a little bit about a topic and an area that seems to have captured the fascination of this country right now. Dr. Yost, let me start with you. You have been here for a year now, which is hard to believe. From your initial impressions, what has the experience been like for you?

Joseph Yost, Ph.D.
Thank you. I've been here almost exactly a year today, and it's been really quite an exciting and whirlwind experience. Catholic University is a very unique place.

It's the only university that I would want to work at in my current position, in part because it's The Catholic University of America. And what makes that unique to me is that there are a lot of very dedicated and smart faculty and staff members here who are really trying to move forward the mission of the Catholic University, to serve the Church in America, and to serve the people of America through both education and research scholarship.

As the senior vice provost for research, research is defined very broadly. It’s not just folks in white lab coats in a laboratory, but it's people who are doing innovation, people who are doing scholarship, diving deep into questions and exploring what's new in the universe from a Catholic perspective, giving us a view of how God put the world together and how it functions and what is our place as human beings in this universe.

Those are the big questions that we've been asking for millennia, and there are people here on campus who are diving into those questions. And they're bringing the students along in that deep search for new knowledge.

That's an exciting reason for students to be here at Catholic University. It's an exciting reason for faculty to be here. And one of the things that I found as I wandered around the campus less than a year ago, is I met a lot of very smart people who are doing these things. But sometimes they're doing them in isolation. And so one of the things that we're really trying to do at all levels is to bring together these brilliant minds and deep thinkers with a much more interdisciplinary approach.

That means connecting people who are brilliant in computer sciences or engineering or the other sciences with folks in theology and philosophy and other disciplines. It allows us to get a holistic view of these deep questions, to make those new discoveries, to make new innovations, and then bring them out to the rest of the world through our students, both graduate and undergraduate.

To answer your question, the most exciting thing I've found this year is meeting the wealth of individuals that we have here on campus who are dedicated to pursuing knowledge and to educating and training the next generation of students.

William Roth
Joe, I appreciate that you've talked about that depth in terms of faculty, students, and the knowledge base you've talked about.

That's a great pivot to introduce Steve Brown. Steve, you've been here for decades, but your new role, you've been in for only a few months, and that role is as the interim dean of the College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing – a new name for a slightly new college.

Building a little bit off of what Joe just talked about in terms of depth integration and collaboration, could you give us a sense of what you see as you look out on the landscape of the college and the University?

Steven Brown, Ph.D.
Thank you for having me and thank you for the question.

I agree with my colleague Joe and what he said, that the University is an exciting place. I've been here for almost 28 years. I came to this University particularly looking for a place like The Catholic University of America. I very much am a son of the Church, very much an academic who sees himself as being placed in an academic environment as a vocation.

So that's the first thing I would say. I've been grateful for every moment that I've spent at this University. I've served in many different roles, everything from a department chair way back in the early 2000s to being associate dean of what was the School of Engineering. I served the last nine years in a centralized administrative role at the University.

So I've seen all aspects of the University, I would say. And now I’m back in my academic home, which I'm very grateful for. Coming back to this place is very exciting because when I left the school nine years ago, we were a school with four departments. I come back to a newly founded college with six departments.

The new departments are the Department of Computer Science, which is a spinoff of what used to be a program within the electrical engineering/computer science department. It's now a completely separate department, which is partly due to the sheer growth in that program. We also have different sub-programs within computer science.

Another department that has joined engineering and computer science is the Department of Physics, which lived in what was the School of Arts and Sciences. Now it’s a part of our new college, because the University has recently achieved Carnegie R1 classification, the highest research classification of how universities are classified in the United States.

There are only 15 Catholic institutions, I believe, that are classified as R1 research institutions, and we’re one of them. Those two programs – engineering and physics together – represent over 85% of the research expenditures necessary to reach that level of excellence and achievement that is recognized by Carnegie.

Back to your question. To play off of some things that Joe said, I agree very much with what we see in the modern academy. This is across the board in secular institutions, Catholic institutions of all sorts. I think it's just a part of the modern world that is a fragmentation of knowledge. There are great things in that. The internet is a very good example. It chops up information, it’s easily retrievable. Sequencing the genome is an example of this. We've done many wonderful things, but there's something lacking in this atomization of knowledge.

Because ultimately, it seems to me, people are desirous of unity in their lives, right? And if you talk to scholars, they all hint at or realize that there's something wrong, there's something amiss.

I don't care if they're completely secular, if they believe in God or not. There's something wrong in the modern world where everything is very fragmented, where the knowledge is very atomized. And so a lot of people talk about interdisciplinarity and they realize there's something good in it, but they don't quite know what that means.

I think in many ways people understand interdisciplinarity as putting together a bunch of different parts and somehow by putting all those parts together, you have something much greater than those parts. And I would suggest there's something very different going on, which is that through going deep into a particular part of reality, whether it be physics, computer science, philosophy, theology, whatever it is… by going deep into that particular reality, one has access to the whole, but it's also only in the whole, that one has access or understands the particular reality.

So you need both things. You need both the particular, but you also need the whole to make sense of the particular. And you don’t reach the whole other than through those particulars. So I think interdisciplinarity is something that Joe and I are very much in alignment on.

It’s what I'm really driving toward in the new college and what I'm trying to encourage in all of my faculty.  I'm trying to put them together with their different backgrounds in engineering research and physics research, trying to see where there are possibilities of working together, of going deep into particular things, looking for questions and opportunities where the questions are not reduced.

Narrow questions are fine too, don't get me wrong, but questions that open up to a much broader understanding of reality can also inform a very particular part of reality.

And I'm doing this also across the University. We’ve had conversations with our Conway School of Nursing because I think there's lots of opportunity between, for example, biomedical engineering, our artificial intelligence scholars, our computer science researchers, and others in mechanical engineering. We have very strong rehabilitation programs. Pairing up with the Conway School of Nursing can help us answer questions like what would it look like if we really go deep into understanding person-centered rehabilitation? Or person-centered artificial intelligence or person-centered computer science? What does this look like?

I want to engage people in other sciences, but also people in humanities, because as Joe said, the questions that people are really struggling with are found in any discipline, no matter what they're doing. The questions have been around for thousands of years, and will be around for thousands of years. What is the meaning of things? How do I fit into things? What's the meaning of friendship? What's the meaning of this particular work? How do I serve the good? What is the good? So all of these questions are really in play, on some level, in every research discipline.

This is one of my hopes, that not only do we remain focused and looking inward, but also always opening up to a much larger question.

William Roth
That's not something one always hears from a dean of engineering, but it is fantastic to know that you have this sense of wanting to bring things together. I like your notion of people-centric, person-centric, human components, and we'll touch more on that as the discussion goes along.

As you've talked about the inward collaborations, it allows me to pivot to Dr. Ko and talk about a dimension that you uniquely bring to the campus, which is your experience in industry, as well as your experience as a top flight academic. I was curious, when you decided to come to Catholic University, what were the things that first attracted you? And since you've been here for about a little over a semester,  what have you found to have lived up to that attraction?

Hanseok Ko, Ph.D.
Thanks for inviting me to this very great discussion. I’ve learned a lot the last 10, 20 minutes from Joe, as well as Steven, reflecting their thoughts on this cross-discipline aspect, which I think is very important.

I've also had that deep sense of feeling in my thoughts for years. Most of the research work that I've been doing, both in industry and academia, has been focused on a very narrow field. But then at the same time, I thought that there would be a lot of value having these different components merged together into one big cross-discipline product.

For example, there's one product I've been working on, a virtual assistant, which really is an end-to-end sort of product. It encompasses the process all the way from perception to understanding and then response. It's going to involve not just one discipline, but multidiscipline in terms of technologies.

Now the interdisciplinary that we've been talking about touches not only technology, but also the humanities and social sciences. I've had this thought for years: instead of just forging ahead with a technology that's meant for the secular world, what if we do it from the perspective of God. How would that make us do things differently? And I was very touched when I was walking around the campus with all the slogans and the signs that say, “Shine with light.”

I was very touched by these things. I felt that in a deep way, and at the same time saw that the University was trying to open up interest in artificial intelligence, which is a discipline that I am strong in.

So with AI being a focus of the University president and leaders, along with this cross-discipline aspect, which I really enjoy and think will bring a great value to the overall mission that we are trying to achieve here.

I thought that this is going to be a huge opportunity, not just for the University, but also for myself. I could see myself becoming very motivated by it. Not that it's going to become something just for the secular world, but it's also going to help this very gray area that needs to be highlighted – the ethical aspect.

This moral aspect is something that I value so much. It is the mission statement of this University. So that brings me a lot of motivation.

William Roth
The notion of linking the practical applications of the research, but also not ignoring the impact that practical application will have on society and our understanding, you all have complimented each other in this. So before we dive deep specifically into artificial intelligence, machine learning and emerging technologies, let me pull back to something that Steve highlighted related to R1 status and what that actually means for a university, what that means for the research ecosystem that we have here.

In April of this year, we, as a University, achieved R1 status. It took a long time to develop the right things, but in your worldview right now, Joe, I was just curious how you think outside entities look at us now that we've achieved this sort of status. How do you want to capitalize on that distinction beyond clearing the threshold in and of itself?

Joseph Yost, Ph.D.
Thank you for that question. Carnegie R1 is a status that's recognized by the Carnegie Institute. What they do is they evaluate every university in the country, and they've refined the way that they do that. Right now, the metrics are over $50 million a year in research expenditures as well as at least 70 Ph.D. students graduating every year.

Those are the current simplified metrics, and we cleared both of those thresholds in the previous year. The University brought in over $50 million of research, and that's been growing rapidly for the last five to seven years at about an 18% growth rate per year in our research activities, which is a really exciting growth rate.

One of our goals is to continue that growth rate. Right now it’s a challenging time in the research enterprise in general, across the country, with changes on how research is funded. Changes in the federal government really impact that. We're looking at many new avenues to increase that research activity and focus in various places around campus.

Artificial intelligence is one of those areas where we're really building out the research enterprise across campus, especially  with things that are happening in the College of Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science, with Professor Ko and other newly hired faculty, and with new education programs. The college now has two new education programs: a bachelor’s and master's in artificial intelligence.

We have a lot of new efforts coming out of the provost’s office that will help design new programs that are related to research in education. Other master's programs will be rolled out. Certificate programs are being put together. Some of these will be in person, some will be online, either synchronous or asynchronous. We're going to be making a lot of new offerings in the education area that are directly related to research growth across campus.

And so R1 does give us a marker to be among the elite universities in the country with this status. It gives us an opportunity to emphasize our strengths here on campus. And I think it will help us recruit students, both graduate and undergraduate, to our campus, as well as employers and other people who are interested in hiring from Catholic University. It’s being recognized that our students are graduating with an education at a top tier university.

It will be good for our alumni. It will be good for our employer relationships, for our business relationships, and for our industry and government relationships. The R1 status really opens the door to a lot of new opportunities for growth.

William Roth 
Steve, Joe talked about two new degree programs, both of which will be housed in your college. They focus on artificial intelligence, both at the bachelor and master level.

You've had a very successful data analytics program, and students graduate with a unique skillset. Can you talk about how you imagine the new AI degree programs building off the success you've had in the data analytics one?

Steven Brown, Ph.D.
Thank you for the question. As you mentioned, the data analytics program – a master’s program – has been rapidly growing over the last five years or so. It's a program that was created by my predecessor Dean John Judge. It's very attractive to a whole host of students, but particularly it's been attractive to international students.

There's been rapid growth in international students in that program over the last five or so years. And now we have this master of artificial intelligence.

I think they mesh very well together because they're based on computer science. They all have slightly different applications. Based on market research and some anecdotal demand as well, we expect strong growth in the Masters of Artificial Intelligence program. Fortunately we have faculty like Dr. Ko and a number of other experts in this area. I have great hopes for the growth in that program over the next several years.

We conceive of all these programs – the Master’s of Computer Science (we also have a doctorate in computer science, by the way), the masters in data analytics, and the masters in artificial intelligence – in very different ways than you might find in other places.

People talk about ethical AI, ethical data analytics, ethical computer science, and all of these sorts of things. In many instances, I'm not trying to say all, but in many instances, I think when people talk about this in the outside world, they're talking about putting a veneer on an underlying thing. We would say that there is something very different about reality, about the gift that's been given to us, of our reason and how we apply reason.

And I think all of this comes to bear in the way in which we educate people in these programs of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and computer science, and then how those people go out and then begin to move those fields forward when they go into the world of work.

So again, while I'm not opposed to using this word “ethical AI” or “ethical computer science” or “ethical data analytics,” I would just emphasize that it's not a veneer. It's not a veneer that’s simply placed on top and then someone can pat themselves on the back and say, “we have ethical something or the other,” and then go off and do whatever they want.

Ultimately, I think all questions in life boil down to two broad questions. And one is an anthropological question, that is, “who is the human person?” And the other is a theological question, “who is God?”

And in many ways those two questions are related one to the other.

William Roth
So Steve, just to make sure we get a fine point on this, you are really talking about the Catholic prism upon which we imbue learning in the study here. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you see that manifesting itself, both in the research, but also in the students?

Steven Brown, Ph.D.
Pope Benedict famously invited us to broaden reason and its application. I think in the Catholic Church’s understanding, reason is an opening to reality. Ultimately what the person is struggling with is to understand the meaning of reality and where they fit in.

Everything is a question of meaning, and people learn, “I don't impose the meaning on an object, but rather the meaning is revealed to me. I relate to this reality and discover its meaning.”

One of the fascinating things to me, and this is my way of reading things, but all of the great advances that have gone on in Silicon Valley and all these great advances in artificial intelligence and these sorts of things, what's very fascinating to me is I think that at some level, while many of the people involved are just pure materialists, they also have deep questions of meaning. Because many of these founders who are very wealthy today, some of them are obsessed with prolonging life, right?

They're investing trillions of dollars in trying to prolong life. And again, it seems to me that this is a unique contribution that we have to offer to proclaim that at the center of everything is the person, the community. Ultimately, the question that everyone has to face is death, is suffering. Now, I'm not suggesting that in the research you're doing this concretely, but all of the movement of a person in life is to understand where they fit in, what's the meaning of things.

All the great discoveries that have been made in science and engineering and mathematics over the years were driven by this: the desire to know. And so ultimately, this is what’s very different about the way in which we try to engage students and research.

It's not just about the mechanics of learning how to program. Of course you need that. Of course you need to do that, and of course you need to do that very well. Otherwise you're not gonna be a computer programmer. But there's a much deeper level in which one can engage and that's my hope.

Joseph Yost, Ph.D.
And that's interesting that you mentioned Pope Benedict, because now we have Pope Leo. I'm sitting here looking out and reminding myself that this building that we're in is called Pope Leo Lane, that was named after the previous Pope Leo XIII. And now we have Pope Leo XIV, and he very clearly and explicitly took the name of Pope Leo because he recognizes that we are now in a new industrial revolution.

The previous Pope Leo who founded our University was in the first industrial revolution in the late 1800s. And our current Pope Leo, a fine fellow from Chicago, one of my hometowns, recognized right off the bat that we are now in a new place where there are emerging technologies that are impacting every aspect of human life, how we relate to each other, how we think about all the questions that Steve has very beautifully raised.

What does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to interact with each other? What does it mean to interact with God and our universe? We're excited that Pope Leo took the name of Pope Leo, and we really see that as sending us on this mission, in a way, to pay attention to the ethics and the moral impacts of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

Those other technologies are emerging very quickly. And many of those are on the topic that Steve touched upon about issues, about the end of life, about suffering in life. These biological, if you will, issues that our biologists and our nursing students and other people recognize the important aspects of, what does it mean? What is the meaning of life? What is life?

Our biologists and our nurses, and our practitioners in healthcare understand those questions from those perspectives. But, those emerging technologies that are coming about fast and furious in the bioethics space are some of the things that we're paying attention to and building out in this new drive towards artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. These are overlapping technologies that are raising new questions to these fundamental questions that Steve has touched upon.

We're getting in front of that at the Catholic University. We're building research programs to pay attention to those, to go deep on those questions, and to bring our students along and help build the students to face those realities in the coming generations.

William Roth
We've touched a little bit on the larger research ecosystem here.

Steve took us in the direction of understanding how there is not merely a desire for veneer and understanding humanity related to research, but a deep-seeded commitment to understanding it in its totality and placing humans at the center, as you rightly said.

Let's get to the issue that we are talking about related to artificial intelligence. Dr. Ko, you’re working with students in the classroom and in the research lab. What would you say is a current misconception about artificial intelligence that you hope to correct in a way that is unique to how you've looked at the problem over the last few decades?

Hanseok Ko, Ph.D.
There are a few things where there has been misconception. One is that when I show a demo, automatically students think, “Hey, wow. It's magic.” But, it’s not magic, there’s a lot of work that went on.

I come from a technical background, and I’ve been feeling such a lack in the ethical aspect of some of these questions that were being raised by Joe and Steve here. I felt so relieved, being here at this University where we have a school of theology, a school of law, of philosophy, all of these disciplines that are going to help us.

I think again where we find the values of this university, is in this ethical aspect to the technology, to this discipline to make it very whole. I'm very happy that I'm here, that this is a home where we can find such a discipline.

As far as students are concerned, I hope that they aren’t just here to graduate from the university – with a certain knowledge to navigate through their life – but also to have this obligation that they are going to be leaders, not just workers or producers, but to think and navigate from the standpoint of a top-down approach, not just bottom-up.

To do this requires a thought process of ethics that comes along with technology, but also with the ethical aspect that’s going to really help out, for them to be able to think in a more global sense, a more balanced sense. That will make them feel more equipped to be the leaders, not just workers.

William Roth
It's helpful to hear you say that you're not merely training folks to understand AI as tasks, but to actually understand implications and this notion of leadership. To me, you're building off of a comment Steve made about the notion of taking a deep look at a problem.

I'm trying to draw from multiple disciplines to fill out the space, but it's with an eye towards leading others to take that view. How do you imagine in your labs you're going to shape that leadership thinking, if you will?

Hanseok Ko, Ph.D.
I think for anybody who has this leadership capability, or people who not only communicate, but communicate with more of a global sense that’s not narrowed in on a very technical aspect, they are going to impact society. So I think for anybody who really has this leadership capability or to communicate with more of a global sense, but not a very narrow technical aspect, how this is going to impact our society.

Again, we've been talking about AI and the human-centered aspects of it, values. I think someone who has this leadership quality is someone who can actually see those aspects as well, and not just improve on certain accuracy measures of other certain performance techniques, but also think, “how is this going to have an overall impact on society? What are some of the values that will do something very good for the rest of the society?” That's going to make people different.

William Roth
You've highlighted this notion of leadership, almost like a leadership “gene” or “trait” that will come out of it.

And Steve, you talked about the notion of having a deeper understanding of a human-centric approach to AI. Joe, the other leg to the stool might be the word “entrepreneurial.” How do you see entrepreneurship blending with the two other qualities that we've already talked about? Is that something that you see is uniquely done here at Catholic University?

Joseph Yost, Ph.D.
I think it is, from several different perspectives. The Busch School of Business is a very unique business school in that they really emphasize mentoring and training their students for entrepreneurship.

They have labs that help their students figure out how to do startups or how to start a new company or how to manage entrepreneurial outreach and those sorts of things. The College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing has similar programs in which their students learn how to put together a new project and get it out there to the rest of the world.

And in the AI and emerging technology space, we are building very strong relationships with a lot of the leaders in both fintech and high-tech and other relevant, emerging technologies. We find partnerships with the rest of the world, act as a conduit through the University, and then give it back to the rest of the world.

The programs and the relationships we're building in the research space – those deep connections – we're not just doing these things in our own little bubble, but really taking input from the outside and then bringing it back to the outside. That will be important.

There will be new startups from the various schools and colleges on campus that we're going to be building out to the rest of the world. The students have opportunities to start new companies. In the near future, we’ll have an incubator-type program that helps students and faculty do that in a more effective and efficient way.

We're setting up collaborations between the different schools and colleges. For example, Steve's college and the Busch School of Business are a great example of those interdisciplinary programs that point towards entrepreneurship in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, and bringing all of those different cogs and wheels and parts together.

As the students learn how that's done, it helps them grow in leadership, it helps them interact with people in industry and in academia, and it helps them aspire to learn from them. I find that, especially with undergraduate students, they don't even know what's available and, once they see things that have been done, they look at that and say, “Hey, I can do that, too.”

My area's genetics and genomics, so I'm familiar with that bio space. I worked on a program that brought students in and we would plug those students into research groups. When we surveyed the students coming into the program, they had very low aspirations, but once they were exposed to the faculty and the teams who were doing these entrepreneurial things, they realized, “Hey, that's something I can do. That's something I can pursue. How do I do that? Where do I want to go?” It really gives them more headroom to grow out as an individual person and think about how they want to be a leader, as Dr. Ko mentioned, in whatever thing they're doing as citizens in the future.

William Roth
A leader with high aspiration, a leader imbued with virtues, and someone who also has an entrepreneurial freedom, and a bit of a commercial sense, right? It's not merely just to do it in theory, but to have it be applicable in ways. Steve, please build on that.

Steven Brown, Ph.D.
I want to comment on something that Joe said, and then also something that Dr. Ko said. I mentioned I've had some preliminary conversations with a number of different schools outside of my own. Joe just mentioned the Busch School of Business.

Within the Bush School, there's the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship, and then within that there's the VentureLab. And so I've had some early conversations with them because all of our undergraduate students in engineering have to complete a year-long senior design project, and I agree with you, we don't want to just put things on the shelf to sit there and collect dust. We have students who are 20 or 21 years old that have some very good ideas, and they often have commercial potential.

The problem is not so much the student, it's us not asking enough of them or encouraging and helping them along. And so I think there's great potential between my own college and then the Busch School, in particular through their VentureLab and the Ciocca Center.

For example, this fall, we’re going to have a course taught by one of our professors in computer science doing artificial intelligence research, Gregorio Toscano, and Andreas Widmer, the director of the Ciocca Center. As part of that, they're going to do a hackathon around AI. All of these things are good, and it's going to push toward not only things that have a theoretical impact, which we also need to do – we need to understand things. This ties into something that Hanseok said, which is when people develop these large LLMs [large language models], they often want to mystify them, to make them big black boxes. They say, “oh, these things are really thinking,” and all this sort of stuff, but the machines are doing no such thing, right? They’re just super complex, super big. And often the developers can't necessarily predict what's going to come out, but they're mechanistic. Ultimately, it seems to me, part of what our faculty need to do when they engage with students is to demystify these things for them.

Again, people want to understand, we're all driven to understand. These students need to be challenged to go deep into that field. Not at the surface, to go deep and really understand and move forward a particular field, whether it be in the developing LLMs or whatever it might be.

Now returning back to the question of entrepreneurship, I'm trying to bridge all across the institution. I've had a number of conversations now with our athletics department. At our undergraduate level here in the college, roughly one-third of our students participate in Division III sports – every sport from A to Z.

It made me realize that they have practical problems over there. They need people that know about data science, they need people who can help them with AI. They have some very practical problems that they've engaged in. This fall, we're gonna try to engage in two projects. One is for rehabilitation of athletes, and a second one is just some shading on Carlini Field.

There are all these opportunities, and when we do those things, while it may not actually materialize, all of these should have this sort of scope or aim toward commercialization, entrepreneurship, developing something big, really making a contribution, really solving someone's real problem. That's our hope.

William Roth
Dr. Ko, do you find that there are certain elements that create good research environments? What would you say is the atmosphere that needs to be around a good AI program?

Because a concern could be raised that Catholic University is a good, solid place, but it's a little small. How can it solve such large problems? How can it address these bigger things? Are there things you're seeing in this space that are giving you a lot of hope and belief that some of the things that Steve was talking about can be delivered upon?

Hanseok Ko, Ph.D.
Yes. Great question. These are the questions that I've been facing these days.
There are a couple of aspects. One is having to do with students. Fortunately, the students that I have here now are going along with me and have a lot of discipline.

Understanding discipline is very important. When I say discipline, I mean that they need to put a certain amount of hours into the research. Not that they just put their names on the list, but to really do the work, to delve into the very specifics of the research topic.

At the same time, because we're a small school, we may not have the facilities that cater to the kind of research that we want to pursue. Therefore, what I've been thinking about and trying to do in the past month or so, has been networking with industries to see if they could collaborate with us.

We could help address their needs with  certain technical issues, but then also tap into their  significant amount of computation resources that look like they are idle.

I thought this would be a good match. So that's one aspect that I'm pursuing: networking with industries to get some of the computation resources available to us, which for artificial intelligence computational tools, it’s one of the essential components, the essential elements, that make AI research work possible.

William Roth
So our size is not a hindrance because you can broaden us out through these relationships with industry?

Hanseok Ko, Ph.D.
I think so. At the same time, as I said before, this ethical aspect which brings all these cross-disciplined enterprises together, these different schools together, it brings a lot of value to our research and increases interest from those outside entities.

So I take this as a lot of value. It's just that we have to do a little bit more work to get these roads paved so that this networking becomes very successful. Hopefully this infrastructure I'm talking about entails not just facilities, but also staff. Staff who can put in a superior amount of time providing the support.

Steven Brown, Ph.D.
Also, in terms of the size, I think we've already addressed one aspect of what I would want to say, which is if we really work together, really come together around bigger questions, I think we have a strength that I don't know that you're gonna find everywhere.

There are very few institutions that have these human disciplines that can come together in the way that they can here at The Catholic University of America, and really impact, and I would dare say, change the way in which people engage with these emerging disciplines.

The other thing that I would say there is when you remain isolated, impartial – earlier I spoke about atomization and fragmentation of knowledge – you actually ask partial questions. If all of what we said before is true, then a deeper question can actually be asked. Often I think we go about solving the wrong problem because we haven't asked the right question.

What this institution can do? Are we doing it to the best of our abilities right now? Probably not. We're probably falling short, but that's okay because part of moving forward is recognizing and coming together across the institution, across all these different disciplines, to ask deeper, more profound questions, which can then can animate all of the work that people like Hanseok do in his laboratory, with his students and all his collaborators in the D.C. area, and so on.

I can tell you all of my interactions thus far in my short time as the dean, with people outside of the institution in the D.C. area, they're asking the same sort of questions. They can't quite make sense of things. They need a way forward. The University actually has a way forward, or can at least propose one, in a way that not all institutions can.

William Roth
That's a great segue to talking a little bit about the larger ambition that the University has around this space of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, in terms of taking all those adjacencies that Steve's highlighted and bringing them together around deeper, larger necessary questions.

Joe, you've been tasked with trying to develop a larger framework to grow that optimization that Steve is highlighting, that we're on the precipice of making in this space. Could you talk about the framework that you imagine evolving here at the University?

Joseph Yost, Ph.D.
We started a task force on AI to gather the activities around campus and find out what people are doing, and then connect people to “de-atomize” people across campus. That's been very exciting. We've had in-person and virtual meetings amongst the faculty across campus who are focused on AI research or who are focused on the utilization of AI and the educational process, who are focused on AI and the implementation of AI and AI-adjacent tools in whatever activities they're doing, whether it's in the business school or in administration on campus.

It’s been just gathering these people, and “de-siloing” them. These have been very delightful meetings. One of the faculty in the sociology department has started a book club on these AI topics. Many faculty have joined and have lively conversations if they’re asking the right questions.

There's clearly a huge hunger across the country, in Silicon Valley, and elsewhere to get at some of these big questions. And as Steve mentioned, we are in a unique position to use our strengths in theology and philosophy and sociology and other aspects of humanities that are unique to Catholic University because of our place as the bishop's university for America, to use that unique position. Also being in our nation's capital centralizes who we are as Catholic University and allows us to pursue these questions.

This AI task force has done this gathering process and has brought people together. We’ll continue to grow and build, and it will result in hackathons and other things as were mentioned.

We're also standing up a new institute that is currently named the Institute for AI in Emerging Technologies. We've identified a person from the outside who is a leader in the commercial space of artificial intelligence in one of the major high tech industries, and he is joining us at the Catholic University to take a leadership position in that area, and he'll be joining us very soon.

He is going to help accelerate the things that we've started here. I think in the next year, we're going to see huge growth in all the things we've talked about: in AI research and AI education, in utilization of AI and evangelization, in getting it out there to the rest of the country.

One of the other things that we're doing is recognizing the thirst and the need for an understanding of what these emerging technologies are. For example, our bishops have been asking us, “what is this AI thing?” Some of them are on board and know what it is, and they utilize it. Others recognize that it's something that, as our new Pope Leo pointed out, is going to impact all of society. It's impacting the parishes, it's impacting the diocese. It's really affecting how people of faith are thinking about these big questions. This new AI institute is going to help put this information together and help the bishops work through that thought process of how they utilize AI in their diocese.

How is it being utilized from a pastoral perspective, and how can they be aware and be prepared in advance for helping their parishioners deal with the impacts of AI? What does it mean? AI is asking us what it means to be a human? What does it mean? What does work? The nature of work is changing very rapidly through AI and adjacent technologies.

I think that we are positioned as The Catholic University of America to help our bishops who struggle with those questions. We can help them recognize those questions and find some ways to answer them.

Steven Brown, Ph.D.
And just since Joe mentioned our colleague in sociology, I'd like to just make a point about some work that he does, which I think is very fascinating.

Brandon Vaidyanathan is doing incredibly fascinating work on beauty. One thing that he's been studying a lot, is he's documenting the aesthetic sensibilities and how scientists, when they engage in their work and when they move forward in understanding reality, it's really a movement of beauty, of aesthetics. It's really fascinating work. And he's documenting across different disciplines and sciences.

And now we have joined forces here at the University in this new College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing. We have physics, which has been doing wonders at both very small scales and very large scales. Our own provost, who does high energy physics and whose research laboratory, if you will, is buried deep beneath the earth in Europe at CERN where they do high energy physics.

He develops very high speed detection cameras, and as part of those discoveries, they were able to identify the Higgs boson particle, which was first theoretically proposed in the early 1960s. It's the so-called “God particle,” if you will.

That's one aspect of what they do. And then on the other end of the spectrum, on much larger scales, we have a lot of people looking at the stars. And we have very strong collaborations with NASA, in particular NASA Goddard here in the D.C. area out in Greenbelt, Maryland.

I dare say, all of that incredibly fascinating work that we’re doing here at Catholic University moves our knowledge of the physical world along. If you speak to each of those individual faculty and researchers that are involved, they're all at some level moved by these same sorts of questions we've talked about before.

We have not yet engaged Brandon in trying to bring him into the school, but I think he has a lot to contribute here at the engineering, physics and computing college. I've had some preliminary discussions with the dean of architecture around aesthetics, as well. What does that look like in engineering? What does that look like for our students? What does it look like for alumni?

All of these questions are very big questions, and I want to always try to raise our gaze above the particular. Sure, the particular is super important and we have to go deep into that, whether we're doing mechanics or electric networks or whatever it may be – absolutely going deep, but always from this perspective of where does it fit in? What are we up to? What are we driving toward? What are we trying to understand?

I really think if we do it right at the University, we can move some of these disciplines forward in a way that others can't.

Joseph Yost, Ph.D.
I agree with you about Brandon. It's very interesting work. And in research, painted broadly, we pursue truth, beauty, and goodness, right? And often one thinks about practicing scientists as pursuing truth, whether it's particle physics, or how the sun is put together, or these amazing things that our NASA scientists are studying, but they actually come to the larger view of things.

They're discovering new truths about the universe, but it's actually the beauty of the workings of this part of the universe. As a biologist, as a geneticist, I've spent my profession discovering new truths about how genes work and how they cause diseases and that sort of thing. But it's the beauty, as Brandon's scholarship has pointed out, it's the beauty of how a developing animal is put together from a single cell into this very complicated organism that brings me closer to these larger questions, into the realization of how God created these things.

The biological systems, the life that we're all living, are created in a very different way than the way an engineer would build it. The actual biology is a really circuitous path to get from point A to point B, whether it's how you build a functional heart, which is a pump from an engineering perspective, but it's not to put together the way any smart engineer would put it together.

It's put together in a very different but very beautiful and enlightening way. And when you see the beauty of how this thing works, it makes you come to these other questions, not through truth, but through beauty.

That's one of the cool things about Brandon's realization is that we come to these three things – truth, beauty, and goodness –  in a circuitous way sometimes, but we get there.

William Roth
Dr. Ko, let me pivot off truth and beauty and goodness, to your word from earlier of discipline. If you were to advise a mother and a father who have a daughter or a son who's thinking about getting interested in studying more in artificial intelligence, what are the skills they need to have? What are the characteristics you want them to possess as they're thinking about that long-term career?

Hanseok Ko, Ph.D.
I mentioned discipline, and I think one of the disciplines that I've been trying to emphasize to my students is when someone who wants to become a leader not only they need to have not just a balanced view about everything, but also having a servant heart. Someone who's actually serving.

I think that a person who can come early to the lab to do their work has this heart of service. I'm just hoping and telling the students that with this knowledge they gain, they will be able to use it to serve others.

That's what would make both the students' parents become happy. Knowing that their child is going to do something good for the world, for humanity, and for God. Discipline is that notion of having this servanthood.

And at the same time, I want students to explore with the heart of challenge. God has given us everything in the world to be able to be more creative, to do something better for humanity, and therefore, that there are a lot of resources that student can explore and be able to use it for goodness, but then they have to have this notion of heart of challenge, otherwise they will not go very far. These are the two aspects I make sure that the students learn at the lab and then make their mom and dad happy.

Joseph Yost, Ph.D.
You're really talking about not just the education of the student coming in, but really the formation. Catholic University is helping form this person as they're transitioning into adulthood, right? You're giving them opportunities to really explore themselves and form themselves into the virtuous person who will become a leader in society, who will then go out as a formed person.

Because the technical skills that we're teaching these folks, especially in the rapidly evolving areas, are gonna be antiquated five years from now. So if they just learn those technical skills, we're not doing right by them. But as we're walking them through those rapidly evolving technical skills, we're really mentoring them and helping them form a holistic human person, from a Catholic perspective, to get out there into the world. That's really the value of our education here, is the formation of our citizens.

Steven Brown, Ph.D.
And I would say I agree that ultimately what you want somehow is these questions in the student to remain alive for all of their life.

It's not just giving them a set of skills and then they go off on their way. When Pope Benedict XVI came here in 2008, he spoke about education both being informative and formative. So you're emphasizing very strongly this aspect of being formative.

Ultimately, this discipline you want to instill in the students is also to understand that everything doesn't depend on them. Everything doesn't really begin and end with them. They're part of something larger. They will always be faced with these questions.

Those questions, whether they're going into artificial intelligence or they're going into biology or whatever it is, these questions will remain. Once you dismiss those questions, then I think somehow your ability to even move knowledge forward goes away, right? Because maybe you'll go off and you'll do certain things, I don't know, but ultimately you have to be driven by these transcendentals that Joe mentioned of beauty, goodness, and truth.

This weekend, I just happened to see these little YouTube videos of Edward Teller, one of the guys involved in nuclear and atomic energy. He was commenting on all these scientists. There were some on Einstein and some on Niels Bohr and so on. And what was very striking to me in these little interviews, you realize that none of these people do great things isolated. They move things forward, but not by themselves. It's always somehow within a community.

The other thing is that this discipline instills in students and ourselves that this, the aim or the scope of the institution is always a very large one, right? It's not a parochial thing. It really has a very large cultural contribution to make.

And so this is what every student has to go away from here with. This question that's deeply burning in them, that will animate their entire life.

William Roth
To wrap things up here, I'll ask a two part question. What are the things about artificial intelligence and emerging technologies today that worry you? And then what are the aspects of this space and problem that excite you as educators at this University?

Joe, maybe you could start.

Joseph Yost, Ph.D.
Some of those things will be the same answers to both questions. The things that are both exciting and worrying is that it is a very rapidly evolving set of technologies. AI is not just one thing, but it's many things. And the concerns are the things that we've touched upon.

It's going to change the nature of work, the definition of work. It's going to change human relationships and how people relate to each other. We've already seen that in other technologies. For example, social media has changed how people think of themselves, how they work, how they generate income, how they do all of the things that they do.

Those are not problems relating just to AI, but those are the big questions that we need to address and that we are addressing. The excitement of it is that these tools and these technologies can be used if properly pointed and properly directed to bring great goodness into the world.

It can relieve people from mundane aspects of work. It can help us have fresh looks at questions. For example, generative AI and other types of AI will, if you feed it something, it will give you a lot of information and it will generate some new questions. When you look at that information, you may think of something that you hadn't thought of before.

That's been very true in the biological sciences. For example, it's being utilized to do drug design and it's putting together compounds in ways that people might not have thought to put together compounds.

The researchers then can go and test those ideas. So it does generate new questions and new things that we need to look at. And it also can be used to generate good for society. There's a lot of discussions on campus and beyond about using AI-related tools to address longstanding social problems, and using AI to think about, help us co-think about how to address those problems.

As Steve mentioned, it's a tool that allows you to tackle really large data sets and gather those data sets and query those data sets in ways that we would not have been able to do before. And by using those tools, we can probably find new and different ways to ask the questions of addressing societal concerns, as well as to help us find new answers to those societal concerns.

William Roth
Dr. Ko, for you?

Hanseok Ko, Ph.D.
It's not really a concern, but a challenge for me. As it was mentioned, artificial intelligence is evolving rapidly and for myself, working on artificial intelligence topics, it's just tough, pacing with these new techniques that come up every morning.

You wake up and you see another 10, 20 papers on very similar topics. It's been tough for me in my life dealing with these new technique publications.

I would need more research staff that I can work with so that we can summarize just the volume of the work that's been going on. So rather than a concern of artificial intelligence, if it’s going to hurt or be bad for the society, it’s more of a problem of digesting the massive amount of information.

But like Joe mentioned, and there are many people who are also saying this, there's a tremendous impact to the society in terms of the growth of the economy by hundredfolds, in terms of being able to employ and deploy artificial intelligence to our life.

So there's a huge impact. It's just that for a person who's actually making these things work, who’s developing techniques and technologies,  I'm facing the same problem of digesting that information.

William Roth
Steve, you get the last word.

Steven Brown, Ph.D.
From the concern point of view, as these technologies, as everyone's mentioned, are moving very rapidly, changing daily, that human experience doesn't get left out somehow.

This morning I went for a walk early and saw the sunrise. And however long my life is, I hope that the sunrise moves me every time that I see it.

That would be one thing that I would say, if I think back to my own graduate education, a lot of it was spent with this discipline. I did some experimental work. You spent a lot of time. You need to. You must, otherwise you're simply not going to make any sort of discovery and move anything forward.

But the thing that I really was formative about was I was in a very large lab and we used to sit around at lunchtime, with a bunch of other graduate students around the table. The conversations, the discussion on all sorts of topics on our research, particular problems we were having, all of that human interaction was super formative in my own graduate education. So I hope those things don't disappear.

From the flip side, on the positives, I think that when you put powerful tools in the hands of people who are super creative you will see incredible discoveries, incredible movements in our understanding of reality and so on.

That's my hope for it. That ultimately, at the center of all of it, is not the technology itself, it's the person using and applying and moving that technology forward to understand something, whether it be the stars like our physicists in the college do, or very small particles.

Ultimately, it's the person. It's like when I watch those YouTube videos, Edward Teller speaking about Einstein and Heisenberg. Or our students with tools like these large LLMs and other things that will do incredible things that we've never even thought of. Things that we've never imagined.

That's also why, going back to what you were saying about entrepreneurship, I think we need to get these tools in the hands of our students and let them find really creative things and go make a lot of money doing it.

William Roth 
I want to thank the three of you for a very dynamic conversation around not always easy topics, but the consistency, the conviction and the determination that you all have to see how this emerging space will be tackled at this University is very inspiring.

And to know that those tried-and-true human traits that you all seem to see as being at the forefront of the future in terms of making the determinations of how this technology continues to shape our world is very heartwarming, but also should be encouraging.

Again, I thank you for the time, and  also encourage anyone who is exploring the University to look to all three of you in terms of your webpage, your own personal work, your posts on our social media accounts, and what have you.

I think the key phrase here is watch this space – there’s more to come. And we thank you for your time and your diligence in working to make the place better.