Pepperdine University hosted its sixth annual Human-Centered AI Conference Sept. 25–26 in Elkins Auditorium, bringing together keynote speakers, panels and lectures that examined AI through robotics, neuroscience, ethics and religious traditions.
Computer Science Professor Fabien Scalzo, director of the Keck Data Science Institute, and Vice Chancellor Johnnie Moore, managing director of the Middle East Policy Studies Program, served as conference chairs, according to the university’s event page. Opening-day discussions concentrated on international diplomacy and Middle East relations.
Attendees received copies of keynote speaker Judea Pearl’s book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002–2025. Pearl, a UCLA computer science professor who identifies as a Zionist, said a two-state resolution remains the only viable path to ending the Israel–Palestine conflict and argued that the Zionist perspective reflects a desire for peaceful coexistence between two equally indigenous populations, both Israeli and Palestinian. He added that this clash of views has become a primary dividing line globally at the United Nations and noted that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has also called for two states side-by-side.
On the topic of federal AI regulation, Pearl expressed deep distrust of government policy: “Anyone who says they can control AI is talking nonsense.” He also discussed AI safeguards through a biological analogy: “The only example we have of a supercomputer being enslaved by a less supercomputer is maternal instinct. The mother is enslaved by the baby,” he said. “The baby knows how to control his or her mother and if they want mother’s attention, they start to cry. The mother has no control over it because the mother was programmed that way to help the baby.”
Neuroscientist Leo Christov-Moore addressed attendees on drawing from Buddhist philosophy and the neuroscience of empathy to build human-centered AI; his presentation was the seventh of the day on Sept. 26.
Human-centered AI technical and medical sessions
The conference’s second day shifted to technical and medical applications. After opening remarks from Provost Jay Brewster, presenters included USC Keck School of Medicine professor Paul Thompson and neurologist David Liebeskind, who examined neurovascular AI and vision-language models in neuroimaging. Leo Petrossian, CEO of Kandu Inc., detailed how FDA-cleared brain-computer interfaces illuminate distinctions between AI restoration and augmentation. Jie Li, a research scientist with the MIT Tangible Media Group, explored maintaining humanity in an automated world, and Nick Vincent, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University, outlined AI evaluation methods aimed at fostering a more human-centered data ecosystem, according to the conference’s schedule.
