A.I. FEVER
We are pleased to announce we have just submitted funding proposals for the following two projects. If they are funded, we will hire UTD students on the projects and collaborate with additional interested faculty. If you have interest and relevant expertise, feel free to reach out to Roger F Malina rxm116130@utdallas.edu.
The students who become involved would be able to enroll in our graduate seminar on Emergence called Arts, Sciences and Humanities. Graduate and undergraduate students of any school can enroll or audit the class. It is listed in the UTD catalogue as: Both involve AI Fever (joke).
Mining and analyzing structures on local and large scales:
Bridging cosmology and social structures to identify emergent phenomena:case study emerging silos at UTDallas
Co-Proposers: Prof Lindsay J King, Physics Department, NSM and Prof Roger F Malina, ATEC Bass School
Summary
The project brings together a team of researchers from NSM and AHT, collecting and analyzing data that captures the growth of structures on vastly different spatial and temporal scales – the Universe and the University. By regularly sharing our methodologies and results, and embracing transdisciplinary approaches, we will expand our horizons and potentially arrive at novel interpretations of the data and recommendations for applications.
The STEM project is within the Physics Department, with a graduate from ECS. It involves mining state-of-the-art computer simulations of the emergence of structures in the Universe (cosmological simulations), to gain critical insights into real data from space-based and ground-based observatories. We will better understand the dominant physical processes in galaxies as a function of cosmic time, based on how light traveling from distant bright sources is absorbed by intervening gas. We propose to develop and apply (already promising) machine learning (ML) tools, trained on mock data from cosmological simulations.
The Arts, Humanities and Technology contribution is a project of the new Off-Center for Emergence Studies in the ArtSciLab. A case study for this proposal would be to study the emergence of structures at UTD since its founding; we would draw on cosmology simulation methods to anticipate which future structures will emerge in the university. We will also draw on contemporary sociology and ethnography. The team will include both current and retired faculty as part of the study of the emergence of new types of faculty.
Both projects will involve faculty and students applying domain adaptation methodology, a subfield of transfer learning in ML concerned specifically with adjusting models to work across different—but related—data domains. The methodology draws on the Science of Team Science (US National Academies Report, 2015).
AND
Fred the Heretic (FTH): AI-Powered Creativity Through Visual and
Poetic Workflows Phase 2 Proposal April 30, 2025
School: School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology
Principal Investigators: Roger Malina Co-lead: Flavia Da Costa
Email: rxm16130@utdallas.edu
Emergence Studies Off-Center (OC4ES), University of Texas at Dallas
Summary
Fred the Heretic (FTH) is an innovative, open-source platform developed at the University of Texas at Dallas that combines artificial intelligence and poetic creativity. This proposal seeks funding through the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI) to support Phase 2 of the project: expanding its capabilities to include visual storytelling and launching a public-facing interface. At its core, FTH is a customizable poetry-writing AI trained on the works of internationally renowned poet Frederick Turner, a multiple-time Nobel Prize nominee in literature. Unlike typical AI tools, FTH enables users to personalize the AI’s voice and style, creating original poetry in collaboration with the system. FTH has already engaged a diverse, multilingual research community including students, faculty, artists, and retired scholars from around the world. In this next phase, it will integrate tools like n8n to create cross-modal poetic experiences, where words generate visual expressions in real-time. The initiative also includes public workshops, academic research, and interdisciplinary engagement across the arts, humanities, computer science, and cognitive science.
This project has the potential to redefine how AI is used in cultural and educational settings, offering a new model for inclusive and ethical creative technology. With a strong foundation at UT Dallas and a growing network of collaborators, FTH stands to make North Texas a national leader in AI-mediated literary and artistic innovation.
May 1 2025, Contact rxm116130@utdallas.edu
