USC Computer Scientist Answers Five Common Questions About AI - USC Viterbi | School of Engineering

Robin Jia delivering a speech at the inaugural summit of USC’s Institute on Ethics and Trust in Computing. (Photo credit: Brian Morri)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has advanced rapidly and has generated excitement, but its “black box” nature continues to raise questions about how it works and whether it can be trusted.

USC computer scientist Robin Jia studies these questions through AI interpretability, a field that examines how models reach their outputs, why they succeed or fail and how to make them more transparent and reliable.

Jia’s research sheds light on how AI actually works — from how models learn and generalize to how AI thinks and makes decisions.

Jia leads the AI, Language, Learning, Generalization, and Robustness (ALLEGRO) Lab at USC and is an assistant professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and USC Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and AI’s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.