Lisa Titus
Lisa Titus (née Lisa Miracchi) is a tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver.
Previously, she was a tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also a General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Lab affiliate and a MindCORE affiliate.
She works on issues regarding mind and intelligence. What makes intelligent systems different from other kinds of systems? What kinds of explanations of intelligent systems are possible, or most important? What are appropriate conceptions of real-world intelligent capacities like those for agency, knowledge, and rationality? How can conceptual clarity on these issues advance cognitive science and aid in the effective and ethical development and application of AI and robotic systems? Her work draws together diverse literatures in the cognitive sciences, AI, robotics, epistemology, ethics, law, and policy to systematically address these questions.
She is currently writing a monograph tentatively titled Wholly Intelligent: Towards the Next Wave Effective and Ethical Intelligence Research. Theis project, which received a prestigious National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, develops a systematic approach to intelligence and its explanation, and facilitates the integration of ethical, feminist, and social justice concerns. Additionally she has a number of active collaborative projects, including work on the ethics of Autonomous Weapons Systems, the impact of the widespread feminization of AI on society, and how to best conceptualize complexity as related to cognition and behavior of biological and artificial systems.
She is dedicated to making academia more welcoming for all humans, especially those of us from underrepresented groups. She regularly mentors undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and early career faculty, has designed and implemented a wellness program for Ph.D. students, and is active as out LGBTQ faculty.
Lisa is also passionate about utilizing her expertise to help provide cutting-edge AI solutions to real-world problems. If you think she would be helpful for your project, feel free to get in touch.
lisa.titus@du.edu
Selected Publications
“Does ChatGPT Have Semantic Understanding? A Problem with the Statistics-of-Occurrence Strategy.” Cognitive Systems Research, 2023.
“What the Tortoise Should Do: A Knowledge-First Virtue Approach to the Basing Relation." Noûs 2023 (with J. Adam Carter).
“A Plea for Integrated Empirical and Philosophical Research on the Impacts of Feminized AI Workers." Analysis, 2022 (with Hannah Read, Andrea Beltrama, and Javier Gomez-Lavin).
“Updating the Frame Problem for AI Research." Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, 2020.
“Examples of Gibsonian affordances in legged robotics research using an empirical, generative framework.'' Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 2020.
“Generative Explanation in Cognitive Science and the Hard Problem of Consciousness.'' Philosophical Perspectives, 2017.
(Photo credit to Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa)