Dr. Rachel Chung is a self-proclaimed nerd. Fortunately, the College of William and Mary benefits from her distinguished research on artificial intelligence. Chung works as a clinical associate professor of operations and information systems management at the Raymond A. Mason School of Business.
Chung received her first Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh while pursuing a master’s in information science at the same time, taking night classes. She explained that the two fields are very similar at their core, focusing primarily on behavior that lends itself to action.
“Fundamentally, business is about doing transactions and sort of organizing people, getting people to change ideas and trade,” Chung said.
Focusing mostly on information and data science at this point in her career, Chung discovered her interest in artificial intelligence in 1997 with a neural networks course at Carnegie Mellon University. The focus was on fraud analysis, using machine learning to find factors that led to the prevalence of fraud in high-profile companies like J.P. Morgan.
While working on her Ph.D at Pittsburgh in the early 2000s, Chung was part of a research lab that studied human facial expressions. Her field of work later became a basis for training neural networks.
“Grad students [would] code every single muscle and every single wrinkle on your face to come up with an equation that will tell us whether you’re actually smiling or you’re sad or angry, and whether it’s a true smile versus a fake smile,” Chung said. “We were surrounded by AI researchers and AI was fundamentally a connection between technology, computer science, and psychology.”
During the early stages of the pandemic, Chung’s sister asked her if she wanted to start a project in programming, given that she was under a stay-at-home order. Chung was teaching data science at the Mason School of Business in March 2020 and saw an opportunity to teach the subject to younger students.
“She was going to teach robotics…but during the pandemic, it’s just not something that’s very viable, touching and sharing all these physical hardware products,” Chung said. “So I said, well, we can do data science.”
She recruited one of her students at the time, Rani Banjarian ’20, to work over the summer teaching data science to students across the country and internationally, such as in Taiwan.
“We had a pretty successful and popular program, and a couple of our students actually won national awards for data science competition, so we were very excited,” Chung said.
In December 2023, Chung and Banjarian picked up the program to turn it into an activity book centered on making artificial intelligence palatable to younger kids. They drafted the story in two weeks over the winter break, later recruiting students to do the illustrations. Ironically, AI illustrations proved too inconsistent at the time.
The result was “AI The Magic Box: An Activity Book on Artificial Intelligence.” Danielle Seay ‘25 created illustrations for the book, which offered a clear-cut approach to data science education for young learners.
Chung published a paper on “AI The Magic Box,” which received the best teaching paper award at the 2024 Pre-ICIS SIGDSA symposium in December. The book will be published in Chinese in June. The book exemplifies Chung’s belief that teaching AI by hand, with low-tech, unplugged methods, can be much more effective, particularly when the drawings are more accessible.
Chung’s psychology background has translated well to her teaching career, as developmental psychology emphasizes the usefulness of breaking down complicated concepts into smaller pieces as a learning technique.
“Most people probably don’t know that deep learning is the same as neural networks,” Chung said. “You know, why do you call the same thing using two different words and sometimes we use the same word for different purposes. All of that is actually barriers for learning [and] I think a lot of my psychology training helps me identify that this is what people are struggling with, not because they are lazy or not because they are not smart enough.”
While her work with “AI The Magic Box” has made artificial intelligence more accessible for younger generations, Chung believes that older generations could also adapt to the technology. Chung shared that a crucial step is simplifying the way AI is framed in the media.
“I think the current state of AI communication or scientific communication about AI is too confusing,” Chung said. “The news has been pretty much using buzzwords to explain buzzwords so we’re bombarded with all these buzzwords that we don’t understand.”
Chung believes that AI’s functionality is commonly misunderstood by the public. It is either seen as highly straightforward, like a vending machine, or as an all-knowing search engine.
“It’s just an adorable guessing math box,” Chung said.
Chung explained that artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT is more of a probabilistic machine which makes a series of educated guesses from information on the internet. Its quick response time wrongly makes people believe it possesses general intelligence. However, it still makes mistakes, which it learns fromdevelopmental processes in children.
“If the model does not make any errors it stops learning, so errors are the fuel, the bread and butter of learning,” Chung said.
Since working at the Mason School of Business, Chung has received numerous accolades, including a Faculty Excellence Award from the Master of Science in Business Analytics program in 2020 and the MBA Class of 1997 Faculty Award for Innovative Use of Technology.
Chung will be presenting at the W&M TEDx event Thursday, March 20 at 6:30 p.m. in Sadler Commonwealth Auditorium about her data science research and “AI The Magic Box.”
