Hopkins at Home(wood) - AI in the Classroom: Innovation, Impact, and What’s Next

Jason Eisner is Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics. At Johns Hopkins, he is also affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing, the Mathematical Institute for Data Science, the Cognitive Science Department, and the Data Science and AI Institute. His goal is to develop the probabilistic modeling, inference, and learning techniques needed for a unified model of all kinds of linguistic structure, and to connect existing models (such as LLMs) to commonsense reasoning, formal reasoning, and downstream applications. His 180+ papers have presented various algorithms for parsing, machine translation, and weighted finite-state machines; formalizations, algorithms, theorems, and empirical results in computational phonology; unsupervised or semi-supervised learning methods for syntax, morphology, and word-sense disambiguation; and principled methods for conversational AI, including neural language modeling and semantic parsing. From 2019-2024 he was Director of Research at Microsoft Semantic Machines, which developed new approaches to conversational AI. He is also the lead designer of Dyna, a declarative programming language that provides an infrastructure for AI algorithms. He has received 3 school-wide awards for excellence in teaching, most recently in 2025, as well as recent Best Paper Awards at ACL 2017, EMNLP 2019, and NAACL 2021 and Outstanding Paper Awards at ACL 2022, EMNLP 2024, and COLM 2025.

Emily Fisher has been a teaching faculty member at Johns Hopkins since 2008. During her tenure, she has led several pedagogical innovation initiatives, including integrating substantial active learning into the Biology core curriculum, embedding authentic writing experiences throughout the Molecular and Cellular Biology major, and establishing a learning assistant program to support students in large-enrollment Biology courses. She currently teaches undergraduate courses in Genetics, Research Methods, and a First Year Seminar on Phage Hunting. Professor Fisher serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Molecular and Cellular Biology major.

At the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, Emily directs the campus-wide Teaching Assistant Orientation and leads a summer Teaching Institute that prepares graduate students and postdoctoral fellows for teaching careers in higher education.

Louis Hyman, an American political economy historian, studied at Columbia and Harvard. He has written or edited five books on the history of American capitalism, including Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink, Borrow: The American Way of Debt, and Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. His public writings, exploring shifting labor and financial practices, have been published widely in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and Bloomberg.