Matteo Busso

Maria Kasinidou, Styliani Kleanthous, Matteo Busso et al.

With the surge in data-centric AI and its increasing capabilities, AI applications have become a part of our everyday lives. However, misunderstandings regarding their capabilities, limitations, and associated advantages and disadvantages are widespread. Consequently, in the university setting, there is a crucial need to educate not only computer science majors but also students from various disciplines about AI. In this experience report, we present an overview of an introductory course that we offered to students coming from different majors. Moreover, we discuss the assignments and quizzes of the course, which provided students with a firsthand experience of AI processes and insights into their learning patterns. Additionally, we provide a summary of the course evaluation, as well as students' performance. Finally, we present insights gained from teaching this course and elaborate on our future plans.

Laura Schelenz, Ivano Bison, Matteo Busso et al.

Diversity-aware platform design is a paradigm that responds to the ethical challenges of existing social media platforms. Available platforms have been criticized for minimizing users' autonomy, marginalizing minorities, and exploiting users' data for profit maximization. This paper presents a design solution that centers the well-being of users. It presents the theory and practice of designing a diversity-aware platform for social relations. In this approach, the diversity of users is leveraged in a way that allows like-minded individuals to pursue similar interests or diverse individuals to complement each other in a complex activity. The end users of the envisioned platform are students, who participate in the design process. Diversity-aware platform design involves numerous steps, of which two are highlighted in this paper: 1) defining a framework and operationalizing the "diversity" of students, 2) collecting "diversity" data to build diversity-aware algorithms. The paper further reflects on the ethical challenges encountered during the design of a diversity-aware platform.