When
Assistant Professor
Information Science
The Future of Innovation: Exploring Creativity at the Frontier of AI and Data
Data and artificial intelligence are rapidly transforming how innovation happens—from the resources scientists build upon to how people search for information, communicate, and generate new ideas. In this talk, I ask a broader question: How do data and AI reshape the spaces in which humans explore, create, and innovate? Combining large-scale empirical data with computational measurement and analysis, I first examine data as a building block of innovation, showing how the reuse and repurposing of existing datasets can enable new directions in AI research and scientific discovery. I then turn to generative AI and examine how it reshapes exploration at multiple levels. At the level of information seeking, I investigate how conversational AI changes the range of questions people ask and the diversity of information they encounter relative to traditional search engines. At the organizational level, I examine how AI adoption changes patterns of communication and work. At the level of idea generation, I compare the processes underlying human and large-language-model performance on divergent-thinking tasks, focusing on lexical diversity and movement through semantic space. Together, these studies trace how innovation depends both on the recombination of existing resources and on the ways people navigate information, social, and idea spaces. They reveal how data and AI can open new pathways for discovery while also reshaping—and sometimes narrowing—the processes through which novelty emerges.