Few things in history have changed faster than information technologies, or had more of an impact on human life. They change faster than our institutions, faster than the policies that govern them and much faster than our collective comfort with them.
People don’t just collect, organize and access information anymore. Thanks to the internet, we stream it, remix it, analyze it in massive quantities, automate it, fake it and argue about it online.
Now we find ourselves in the middle of another acceleration: artificial intelligence. Possibly the most consequential technological shift humanity has ever seen, AI gives rise to a larger-than-ever set of information questions. At stake are bias and trust, transparency and accountability, labor and creativity, justice and exploitation, power and governance.
This moment is both a golden age for information science and a gravely serious one. Getting AI wrong has stark consequences. That’s why, at the School of Information, we have made it a strategic priority to advance a human-centered approach to AI through new curricular pathways and strong collaborations across the University of Michigan.
What is human-centered AI?
Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum: People design, deploy and shape technologies. People can be served by technologies, harmed by them or excluded altogether.
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Human-centered AI is an approach to the design and use of AI that prioritizes human needs, values and well-being. Our goal is to ensure AI enhances, rather than replaces, human capabilities.
This includes faculty who are using novel AI techniques to detect Alzheimer’s earlier and bring us closer to a cure, designing AI-powered technologies to support expression for people with disabilities and exposing the hidden assumptions in AI systems.
In fall 2025, UMSI launched an undergraduate minor in human-centered AI and an AI concentration in our online Master of Applied Data Science degree. These programs reflect our conviction that building and using AI systems to serve the social good requires a deep understanding not only of technology, but of people, institutions and culture.
The moment the School of Information was made for
This is exactly the kind of work UMSI was designed to do. We began 100 years ago as the U-M Department of Library Science, focused on ensuring public access to trustworthy information, and first became a school in 1969. We started with books. Things escalated quickly.
With each transformative wave of information technologies, UMSI has adapted our research and curricula to help individuals, organizations and societies keep up.
In 1996, U-M formalized our trajectory by making a bold move: creating a new school that reached across the academy, integrating library and archival sciences with the humanities, computer science and engineering, social sciences, health sciences, art and design, and beyond.
The School of Information took on our current name, becoming a home for thinkers and builders whose ideas spanned disciplines, who wanted to learn from and collaborate with people who think differently from themselves.
Today, that experiment is thriving. Our faculty imagine, critique, design, build, deploy and study technology from many perspectives. Most have affiliations in other units as well, an arrangement that keeps us productively entangled with much of the Ann Arbor campus.
We are home to more than 1,800 undergraduate and graduate students studying everything from human-centered AI to data science and information analysis, to user experience research and design, to health informatics and, yes, library science and archives.
UMSI students do incredible work. Recently, they’ve developed tools to support elections, invented new health interventions, studied what excludes people from technology skills and spaces, implemented digital literacy interventions and created new immersive learning technologies. What unites them is a shared commitment to using information with technology to create a better world.
The hardest technology problems remain stubbornly human, and the pace of change continues to accelerate. When people Look to Michigan for advanced technology, we want them to find technology that improves their lives. Our work is not only to create AI and other technologies, but to understand how people use them, govern them, adapt them, are influenced by them and, when necessary, contest them.
We aim to prepare information leaders who can take this work beyond the university into institutions, industries and public life. Leaders who ensure the most powerful technologies are guided by the best of human qualities: rigor, curiosity and integrity.
— Andrea Forte is dean of the School of Information and a leader in the field of human-computer interaction. Her scholarship draws on her broad, interdisciplinary training to address the challenge of designing technologies that support collaboration, learning and privacy. She has been recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery as a distinguished member for outstanding scientific contributions to the field of computing. Her papers have received recognition in fields ranging from computing to management to library science. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation, from which she received the prestigious CAREER award.
