Responsible AI + Literacy: The CELaRAI Monthly Talk Series
Exploring what it means to teach, read, and lead in the age of AI.
About the CElaRAI Monthly Talk Series:
Each month, we’ll bring together educators, researchers, and school leaders for conversations at the intersection of K–12 literacy and responsible AI. Together, we’ll explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the ways we teach, learn, and lead—with a sharp focus on equity, ethics, and impact.
Whether you’re in the classroom, designing curriculum, leading a school, or conducting research, this series offers insight and inspiration for anyone working to ensure AI supports inclusive and effective literacy practices.
Join us every second Friday at 12:00 p.m. ET. You can subscribe to our mailing list for series updates, or register for upcoming talks individually below. Please note that registration is specific to each talk. We encourage Q&A, so bring your questions!
Upcoming Talks
Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor listened to children read aloud and helped them learn to read. It displayed text on a computer screen, used automatic speech recognition to help analyze oral reading, and responded with spoken and graphical assistance modeled after expert reading teachers but adapted to affordances and limitations of the technology. The Reading Tutor logged its interactions in detail to a database that we mined to assess students’ performance, model their learning, and harvest within-subject embedded experiments to compare alternative tutorial actions. This talk will illustrate a few of the lessons we learned about children, reading, speech technology, intelligent tutors, educational data mining, and doing AIED research in schools.
Jack Mostow, Emeritus Research Professor of Robotics, Machine Learning, Language Technologies, and Human-Computer Interaction, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, mostow@cs.cmu.edu
Jack Mostow founded Project LISTEN to develop an automated Reading Tutor that listens to children read aloud. It won AAAI94’s Outstanding Paper Award, a U.S. patent, inclusion in NSF’s Nifty Fifty, and the Allen Newell Medal of Research Excellence. He subsequently led the RoboTutor team (robotutor.org), a $1M Finalist in the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE competition to develop an open-source Android tablet app to enable children in developing countries to learn basic literacy and numeracy without relying on a literate adult.
Prof. Mostow earned his A.B. cum laude in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He served as President of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society and has authored over 200 publications in artificial intelligence, educational data mining, intelligent tutors, user modeling, machine learning, and speech and language technologies.
English orthography’s complexity demands careful text design for beginning readers. This review examines two distinct text approaches: phonics readers, which prioritize high-frequency, high-utility letter-sound correspondences within words in children’s oral language, and Lesson-to-Text-Match decodable texts, where words are chosen for their alignment to taught lessons. Available evidence is synthesized and fundamental design issues are identified that have yet to be resolved.
Elfrieda “Freddy” H. Hiebert (PhD) is President & CEO of TextProject, which provides open-access resources for teachers. Her research addresses how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge is fostered through texts & has been recognized through awards such as the William S. Gray Citation of Merit (ILA).
Past Talks
Join us for an exciting talk on how AI and speech technology can support learning to read, bridging scientific research and real-world products. Dr. Helmer Strik and his team have been involved in several national and international projects on Literacy and Reading, both fundamental and applied research (see https://www.helmer-strik.nl/projects/). Besides interesting scientific results, two of these projects have led to products of publishers that are now used by many learners. Dr. Strik will present an overview of his team’s research, with a selection of results and insights obtained, focusing on how AI and speech technology can be used to improve Literacy and Reading skills.
Dr. Helmer Strik
Helmer Strik received his MA and PhD in Physics from Radboud University, where he later became Associate Professor in Speech Science and Technology. His research activities address AI-based automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech technology, computer assisted language learning (CALL), e-Learning, and e-Health. He has published over 350 refereed papers, and has obtained various national and international grants for his research (see https://www.helmer-strik.nl/projects/).
He is co-founder of two spin-off companies, and is Chair of the ‘International Speech Communication Association’ (ISCA) ‘Special Interest Group’ (SIG) on ‘Speech and Language Technology in Education’ (SLaTE; see: https://www.helmer-strik.nl/slate/).
Join us for an engaging conversation with Dr. Atri Rudra, Katherine Johnson Chair in AI and inaugural chair of UB’s AI and Society Department, as he shares insights into how this new department is advancing research and education at the intersection of technology, ethics, and society. Together, we’ll explore what responsible AI looks like, and how these ideas can inform innovation across fields, including K–12 education.
Dr. Atri Rudra
Atri Rudra is the Katherine Johnson Chair in AI and the inaugural chair of the AI and Society department at University at Buffalo (UB). Atri was a co-editor of the (initial version of) Mozilla Teaching Responsible Computing Playbook. Atri’s current research interests are in structured linear algebra (with applications in deep learning) and problems at the intersection of society and computing. Atri has received the 2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2022 ICML Outstanding Paper Runner Up Award, two ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Awards (2022 and 2025), two ACM PODS best paper awards (2016 and 2012) and a 2009 NSF CAREER Award.
Atri received his Bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India in 2000 and his Ph.D. from University of Washington in 2007. From 2000-2002, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM India Research Lab, New Delhi, India and he has been at UB since 2007.
What does it mean for young learners to become literate in a world where they can write with AI? This interactive session invites participants to rethink foundational literacy practices through the lens of AI-supported reading and writing. Drawing from the Compose with AI and Compose with AI Foundations projects, Dr. Bruner shares classroom examples and practical strategies that show how even young children can question, interpret, and build upon AI-generated text. Participants will leave with ideas for integrating AI literacy, authorship, and ethics into early literacy and content area instruction.
Dr. Lori Bruner
Assistant Professor in the Department of Literacy Teaching & Learning at the University at Albany.
Dr. Bruner’s research examines how digital media supports early literacy development, with a focus on children’s vocabulary learning and the role of AI in classrooms. Her recent projects, funded by the International Literacy Association and the National Science Foundation, explore vocabulary in digital texts and the design of AI-supported writing tools for young learners.
Contact
For questions or speaking inquiries, please contact info@earlyliteracyai.org