Celebrating an AI Milestone and Guiding the Future

If the original conference asked whether machines could think, today's questions are more complex, and more human. As AI systems generate text, images, code, and predictions with remarkable efficacy, the central challenge has shifted from "Can machines think?" to "How do humans think, create, make ethical decisions, and lead alongside machines?"

"Our legacy carries a responsibility to anchor innovation in human judgment, to ask hard questions about the role of new tools in teaching and research, and to lead higher education in defining how this technology advances knowledge with integrity and purpose,” says President Sian Leah Beilock, a cognitive scientist. ...

... Dartmouth's strength as a liberal arts research university—where computational science converges with philosophy, ethics, media studies, the arts, and the social sciences—means these questions can be addressed from every angle. Researchers are advancing AI's capabilities while interrogating its risks, from hallucinations and bias in training data to the broader challenge of ensuring that powerful tools serve, rather than replace, human judgment.

That integration of depth and breadth is producing scholarship that informs institutions, policymakers, and the public. That work includes research in application of AI for cybersecurity, including BlueStar, an adaptive, hierarchical, game-theoretic AI framework that aims to predict and defend against future cyber attacks, being developed at the LISP (Learning, Intelligence + Signal Processing) Lab with a four-year grant from DARPA.

Dartmouth's graduate and professional schools have also rolled out new offerings related to AI. Thayer School of Engineering has a new AI track within its Master of Engineering program, and undergraduates pursuing a Bachelor of Engineering can now choose a concentration in AI. ...

Kickoff Event: The McGuire Prize

The anniversary commemoration opens Feb. 26–27 with the presentation of the McGuire Family Prize for Societal Impact to Hany Farid, a leading expert on digital forensics whose work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital trust, and ethical responsibility.

The McGuire Prize recognizes leaders whose work demonstrates technology's potential to benefit humanity. Farid served for two decades on Dartmouth's faculty, where he pioneered the field of digital forensics, developing mathematical and computational techniques to determine when images, audio, and video have been manipulated or fabricated.

His research addresses one of the most pressing challenges of the digital age: how to distinguish truth from falsehood in a world where synthetic media can be produced at scale.

Farid's innovations include technologies such as PhotoDNA, deployed globally to identify and remove child exploitation imagery, and advanced methods for detecting AI-generated deepfakes and other manipulated media that have become essential tools for law enforcement, human rights advocates, and major technology companies.

Launching the 70th anniversary with Farid's recognition underlines a central theme of the year—rigorous technical innovation must be paired with ethical responsibility and accountability.

Setting the Agenda for AI's Next Chapter

The year's flagship event, "The Dartmouth Conference, Revisited," will connect AI's founding vision to a future-facing mandate for responsible innovation.

Drawing inspiration from the 1956 summer workshop, the conference will gather researchers, developers, creators, and institutional leaders at Dartmouth from October 29–30 to deliberate on how artificial intelligence can responsibly augment human judgment and creativity and clarify higher education’s role in preserving and cultivating distinctly human capabilities.

The original conference asked how machines could be made to solve human problems. As the field has matured and expanded, the questions now are more nuanced: "How do we strengthen human judgment and creativity in the age of AI?" and "What is higher education's role in expanding these capacities?"

"These questions go to the heart of higher education's responsibility in an AI era," says Peter Chin, professor of engineering and chair of Dartmouth's Faculty Leadership Group on AI. "Framing this dialogue through the committee's role—to discern where AI can accelerate our mission and where thoughtful restraint is needed—ensures that critical thinking and ethical inquiry remain central to crafting an evidence-based approach that can guide others in academia."

The conference aims to produce actionable guidance—published frameworks for centering human judgment, creativity, and ethical responsibility as AI capabilities expand. ...

... More events and details will be announced on the AI at Dartmouth website in coming months. This website will also serve as a hub for updates and opportunities for the Dartmouth community and partners worldwide to engage.