Leading College of Information Science AI Expert Provides Insight on Biden Administration Executive Order

When the top source of U.S. federal government news and insight needed perspective on the Biden Administration’s new executive order on artificial intelligence, Federal News Network turned to AI leading expert Arthur “Barney” Maccabe.

Maccabe, a professor at the University of Arizona College of Information Science and executive director of the Institute for Computation and Data-Enabled Insight, was interviewed for the network’s Federal Drive radio series on November 6, 2023: “All right, the White House has spoken on AI. Now what?”

“The recently released executive order on AI from the Biden Administration drew a lot of interest from technology professionals and interest groups,” notes the interviewer, Eric White.

Maccabe’s take? “[M]y biggest concern going into all of this is the rate of change in these technologies, the rate of introduction of new technologies,” he says in the interview. “And it’s hard to imagine that any process can keep up with them effectively without having a lot more involvement.”

That involvement, says Maccabe, should include not only researchers from academia, but also representatives from national laboratories, professional associations and science boards, among others.

Maccabe is pleased to see the Biden Administration step up on AI.

“I think they’re trying to fill a void that needs to be filled,” he says when asked whether the executive order is a good start. “I’d like to see some tweaks added… but in general, this notion of what our rights as citizens and communities are—start from that and then go through how we build a process that’s as apolitical as possible, that will focus on the technology and the challenges that are real in this process.”

Read the full transcript of the interview at the Federal News Network.

Maccabe, who received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from U of A and PhD in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech, joined the College of Information Science after serving as the computer science and mathematics division director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. At Oak Ridge, he had responsibility for fundamental research enabling and enabled by the nation’s leadership-class Peta-scale computing capabilities, and he was co-author of the Department of Energy’s roadmap for intelligent computing. Prior to Oak Ridge, he spent 26 years teaching computer science and serving as chief information officer at the University of New Mexico, where he was also instrumental in developing the high-performance computing capabilities at Sandia National Laboratory.