Chellappa briefs Congress on AI’s promise and pitfalls
By Dino Lencioni
Johns Hopkins electrical and computer engineering and MINDS faculty member briefed congressional staff at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center on Aug. 4. Hosted by the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute, Engineering Lifelong Learning, and the Office of Federal Strategy, the session focused on advances and risks in AI systems that speak and see.
Rama Chellappa, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering, interim director of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Initiative, and chief scientist at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy, described computer vision’s impact, from aiding people with low vision and identifying missing children to enabling safer autonomous systems. He emphasized real-world limits: data hunger, opaque decision-making, bias, privacy, and vulnerability to adversarial attacks, and posed the core test: “Will it work everywhere, and will it work for everyone?” Chellappa called for standards and robustness research so vision systems generalize across settings and populations.
Chellappa and colleagues offered a shared imperative: pairing innovation with assurance. For congressional staff shaping policy, that means investing in high-quality datasets, transparency, and detection tools so AI that speaks and sees does so responsibly, and delivers benefits broadly and safely.