PASTA: Blending Ideas

Creating an open, inclusive, structured environment for research and teaching conversations spanning the full breadth of the university.

The Pitt AI Scholar-Teacher Alliance (PASTA) is building a community of interest from the ground up, where scholars, teachers, and colleagues from diverse backgrounds and perspectives explore the uses and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). PASTA emerged from the University Senate plenary in April 2023, where a first cluster of faculty speakers saw first-hand the potential value of an open, eclectic multi-sided conversation about AI. Since then, PASTA has grown into a thriving, energetic group, with support from the University’s Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer Mark Henderson.

Cooking Up Collaborations

If you've got fresh perspectives on opportunities and risks associated with AI, PASTA may be for you.

Our members come from various fields, including philosophy, history, public health, engineering, economics, and more. Our discussions are lively and unstructured; our destinations are uncertain. PASTA offers some of the best of what a university should: the opportunity to find fellow travelers in unexpected places and an invitation to have established ways of thinking and practicing be challenged.  We can’t promise that new collaborations, research projects, and proposals will result. But we can’t say that they won’t.

Digesting Delicacies

PASTA meets informally over lunch in Oakland on the first Tuesday of every month, year-round.

We're always looking for new members and new ideas. Join us at our next lunch meeting for an opportunity to engage with some of Pitt's most imaginative minds in AI.

Dining Partners

PASTA builds on and fuels ongoing collaborations at Pitt at the intersections of technology and society. We’ve listed some of those below.

• Center for Governance and Markets (CGM)
• Department of English
• The Future Law Project
• Information Ecosystems
• Pitt Cyber
• Research, Ethics & Society Initiative (RESI)
• University Library System (ULS)

Finishing the Meal

As PASTA members produce new, tasty projects and products, they’ll be listed here.

• Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Generative AI in Research and Education

Saving a Seat

PASTA participation is open to members of the University of Pittsburgh community. To join PASTA or learn more, contact Michael Madison, Professor of Law, at madison@pitt.edu.

We look forward to exploring the future of AI.