About Society & AI

We are an independent research group advancing society-centered AI design, development, and deployment in education—engineering technical systems that address societal challenges while honoring human agency and cultural diversity.

The Society & AI Research Group represents a principled commitment to rigorous scholarship that places human dignity, cultural plurality, and democratic agency at the center of artificial intelligence development in educational contexts. Founded in 2025, we operate as a scholarly commons where research priorities emerge from educational imperatives and ethical obligations rather than institutional agendas or commercial incentives.

Our scholarship advances the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by centering educational equity (SDG 4), reducing structural inequalities in AI access and deployment (SDG 10), and fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships for society-centered technological governance (SDG 17). Through iterative design, development, and deployment, we ensure AI systems evolve through continuous feedback from educators, learners, and communities—positioning stakeholders not as passive recipients but as epistemological partners who actively shape how AI mediates learning experiences.

As artificial intelligence systems increasingly mediate how billions of learners engage with knowledge, develop capabilities, and construct understanding, fundamental questions emerge about whose epistemologies these systems privilege, whose values they encode, and whose futures they make possible. Society & AI addresses these questions through participatory research, open knowledge dissemination, and cross-sector collaboration—contributing to more just, inclusive futures through rigorous scholarship that centers the voices of those most affected by technological change.

Our seven-stage iterative research cycle ensures AI development remains grounded in SDG principles, educational needs, ethical obligations, and continuous evidence-based refinement

Our Mission

To co-create society-shaped educational AI that elevates human dignity, sustains cultural knowledge, and multiplies collective agency.

We pursue this through participatory research with educators and communities, comparative studies across cultural contexts, and design-based inquiry testing AI against dignity and agency criteria. We translate findings into open frameworks and classroom-ready tools, evaluating impact through mixed-method evidence rather than engagement metrics alone.

Our Vision

A future where AI serves as an instrument of human flourishing—cultivating capabilities, honoring diverse ways of knowing, and ensuring technology amplifies rather than automates the irreplaceable work of learning.

We advance this by building society-first guardrails—procurement checklists, policy playbooks, governance patterns—while co-developing educator capacity through professional learning and field pilots. Our approach prioritizes cultural responsiveness and privacy-preserving architectures so communities retain meaningful control.

The Philosophy of Society & AI Research Group

Collective hands from diverse cultures, identities, and communities actively shaping artificial intelligence as co-architects of systems that honor human dignity and amplify societal wisdom

Three Converging Imperatives Demand Independent, Society-Centered Scholarship

Power Asymmetry in AI Development

Educational AI originates predominantly from a narrow set of technological centers in the Global North, embedding particular epistemologies into systems that mediate learning for billions globally. This concentration risks positioning commercially optimized algorithms as arbiters of legitimate knowledge across diverse societies. Without community-centered inquiry, AI becomes an instrument that standardizes cognition rather than cultivating the epistemic plurality essential for flourishing democracies.

Velocity-Deliberation Gap

AI transforms educational systems—and thereby patterns of social reproduction—at a pace that outstrips societal capacity for informed deliberation. Automated assessment, adaptive platforms, and algorithmic sorting now shape educational trajectories before communities establish normative frameworks for their use. This temporal mismatch threatens to institutionalize inequitable structures and pedagogical assumptions that undermine education's democratic function.

Incentive Misalignment

Commercial educational AI optimizes for engagement metrics and standardized performance indicators rather than the capacities democratic societies require: critical reasoning, ethical judgment, collaborative problem-solving, and civic agency. Market-driven development prioritizes scalability and efficiency over nurturing human capabilities that cannot be easily measured or monetized but remain essential for individual flourishing and collective self-governance.

Conceptual Framework

Our research synthesizes insights across disciplinary boundaries—integrating learning sciences, critical pedagogy, systems thinking, and participatory design—to develop theoretical frameworks that are both intellectually rigorous and practically actionable. The interactive knowledge graph below visualizes the conceptual architecture underpinning our scholarly work.

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Interactive Knowledge Graph: Hover over nodes to explore conceptual relationships

Leadership

Society & AI was founded on the conviction that the profound shifts catalyzed by artificial intelligence in education demand a scholarly approach grounded in human dignity, epistemic justice, and participatory governance. Our work seeks to cultivate collective flourishing by rigorously examining technology's societal implications.

Dr. Sai Gattupalli

Founder & Principal Scientist, Society & AI (SAI) Research Group

Sai Gattupalli is a learning scientist and education technologist whose research examines power, culture, and equity in AI-mediated learning environments. His scholarship bridges computational systems and humanistic inquiry, investigating how educational technologies can be designed to honor diverse epistemologies while maintaining empirical rigor.

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Society & AI seeks continuous advice from our expert advisors and fellows.

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Research Approach

Our methodology integrates learning sciences, critical pedagogy, systems thinking, and participatory design to produce scholarship that is both theoretically rigorous and practically actionable.

Methodological Pluralism

We employ mixed methods—combining qualitative inquiry, quantitative analysis, design-based research, and systems modeling—to capture the multidimensional nature of educational phenomena.

Participatory Frameworks

Community knowledge is epistemically valuable, not merely a source of implementation feedback. Our research includes educators, learners, and community members as co-investigators.

Systems Perspective

Education is a complex adaptive system characterized by feedback loops, emergence, and nonlinearity. We map how AI interventions ripple through educational ecosystems.

Translational Scholarship

We translate findings into frameworks, toolkits, and design principles that practitioners can implement, policymakers can operationalize, and communities can adapt.

Critical Reflexivity

We continuously examine our own positionality, assumptions, and potential complicity in the systems we study. Independent research is not neutral.

Acknowledgments & Intellectual Foundations

Society & AI's scholarly work stands on foundations laid by generations of thinkers who understood that technology, education, and society are inextricably linked. We acknowledge our intellectual debt to scholars who challenged power structures, defended human dignity, and insisted that technological systems serve democratic flourishing rather than concentrations of capital and control.

Foundational Thinkers

APJ Abdul Kalam

Technology for Social Good

Kalam's vision positioned technological advancement as a vehicle for human development and educational access. His philosophy—that learning cultivates creativity, creativity enables thought, thought produces knowledge, and knowledge empowers greatness—embodies our commitment to AI systems that amplify rather than automate human capability. His insistence that science serve society's most vulnerable populations grounds our emphasis on equity and accessibility in educational technology design.

Florence Sullivan

Creativity & Collaborative Learning

Sullivan's research on creativity and collaborative learning with computational media established foundational principles for understanding how technology can amplify rather than constrain student agency. Her NSF-funded work integrating robotics and computer science into K-12 classrooms demonstrated that computational thinking develops most powerfully through collaborative problem-solving. Her scholarship on creativity, technology, and learning—grounded in commitment to educational equity—informs our insistence that AI systems must support diverse forms of expression and collective knowledge-building. We honor her legacy by centering justice, collaboration, and creative capacity in educational technology design.

David Deutsch

Epistemology & Knowledge Creation

Deutsch's epistemology of knowledge creation—rooted in Popperian critical rationalism—reminds us that all problems are soluble through conjecture, criticism, and iterative refinement. His optimism about human capability to create better explanations undergirds our approach to AI challenges in education: not as inevitable technical trajectories but as design choices amenable to evidence-based improvement. We adopt his framework that progress emerges from error-correction, not from uncritical adoption of purportedly authoritative systems.

Beverly Woolf

Foundations of AI in Education

Woolf's pioneering scholarship in intelligent tutoring systems established foundational principles for adaptive learning technologies grounded in cognitive science and learning theory. Her commitment to empirical rigor, human-centered design, and pedagogical validity informs our insistence that AI systems must demonstrate measurable learning outcomes beyond engagement metrics. We build upon her legacy by extending adaptive systems toward cultural responsiveness and epistemic plurality.

Seymour Papert

Constructionism & Learning

Papert's constructionism demonstrated that computers should function as cognitive amplifiers, not cognitive replacements. His vision of learners as active builders and creators—rather than passive recipients of instruction—profoundly shapes our approach to AI design. We inherit his conviction that educational technology must support construction of personally meaningful knowledge through active engagement, not consumption of standardized content through algorithmic delivery.

Open Source & Creative Commons

We build upon open-source software, contribute to open educational resources, and publish under Creative Commons licenses because we recognize that scholarship addressing public concerns must return value to the public commons. Knowledge funded by public institutions or investigating matters of collective import should expand the intellectual commons rather than extracting value through proprietary restrictions and access barriers. This commitment reflects both ethical principle and epistemic conviction: knowledge advances most rapidly when subject to widest scrutiny and collaborative refinement.

To Educators Worldwide

The insights animating this work reflect the lived experience, professional expertise, and moral courage of educators who navigate contradictory demands to serve students with integrity. Your knowledge—cultivated through years of practice in specific contexts with particular learners—represents the most valuable form of expertise we possess. This research exists to amplify educator voice and agency, not to supplant professional judgment with algorithmic prescription.

Partner With Us

We welcome scholarly partnerships with researchers, practitioners, and communities who share our commitment to educational equity and society-centered AI development. Collaborative opportunities include:

Co-design of participatory research protocols
Comparative studies across diverse educational contexts
Development of open frameworks and toolkits
Translation of research findings into policy guidance
Capacity-building initiatives for educator professional learning

Contact research@societyandai.org to explore partnership possibilities.

Contribute Scholarly Articles

We invite scholarly contributions from researchers, educators, and practitioners working at the intersection of AI, education, and society. We accept rigorously developed works including:

Empirical research articles on AI in educational contexts
Critical analyses examining societal implications of educational AI
Theoretical frameworks advancing society-centered design
Translational scholarship connecting research to practice
Case studies demonstrating community-centered implementation
Methodological innovations in participatory research

All submissions undergo editorial review for scholarly rigor, methodological soundness, and alignment with our mission of advancing equity, dignity, and democratic agency in AI-mediated education.

Submit proposals to research@societyandai.org