Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the core of GW TAI’s mission to bring together faculty, practitioners, and students to produce and share new knowledge about the design, development, deployment, and governance of trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
Building new, meaningful interdisciplinary connections can be challenging, however, and in the fall, thanks to a suggestion from Professor Alexa Alice Joubin, Founding Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Institute, GW TAI rose to the challenge by hosting two “Oxbridge” lunches, inspired by the tradition of intellectual discourse among scholars from wildly different disciplines.
While teaching at the University of Oxford in the UK, Joubin appreciated the High Table dinners where a philosopher would converse with an astrophysicist about concepts of scale or a poet would debate a biologist on the relations between biological sex and social gender. The High Table, reserved for college Masters and Fellows, is a key tradition of formal dinners and cross-disciplinary conversations at Oxford and Cambridge.
GW TAI inaugurated its version of the Oxbridge luncheon series during the Fall 2025 semester, kicking off the series with a conversation between Joubin, GW Law Professor Robert Brauneis, and GW Engineering Professor Zoe Szajnfarber. They discussed contrasting notions of authorship and creativity in their disciplines.
The event, hosted by Public Health Professor Keith Crandall and the Computational Biology Institute, was designed to provide GW TAI researchers with a forum to discuss core trustworthy AI topics with one another and to hear each other’s unique, interdisciplinary perspectives.
“I found the conversation particularly enriching, allowing the interlocutors to move in and out of their respective comfort zones to conduct litmus tests of a concept in cross-disciplinary contexts,” Joubin shared.
In December, GW TAI hosted a second luncheon, this time focused on “provocations of trustworthy AI,” or trustworthy AI topics that are plausible yet may be considered provocative. Prior to the event, attendees submitted questions they would like the group to consider, and Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Professor David Broniatowski facilitated the discussion around those questions.
“One of the things that made this lunch especially exciting was that the topic emerged directly from the questions participants submitted—it wasn’t a top-down decision, but a genuinely participatory process,” Broniatowski explained.
“That gave the conversation a real sense of energy and ownership. The lunch itself was both a lot of fun and intellectually productive, and it’s already led to a draft paper that we’re preparing to submit for publication. My hope is that future Oxbridge lunches continue to build on this momentum, creating a space where collaborative, curiosity-driven discussions can keep sparking new ideas and concrete research outcomes,” he concluded.