Sen. Victoria Gu, a Westerly Democrat, speaks on the Rhode Island Senate floor on the last night of the 2024 legislative session on Thursday, June 13, 2024. Gu has been chosen to lead a Senate committee which will tackle issues related to AI. (Photo by Will Steinfeld/Rhode Island Current)
A Westerly Democrat will lead a new Rhode Island Senate committee on artificial intelligence and its increasing impact on life in the Ocean State.
Sen. Victoria Gu has been named chair of the new Senate Committee on Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Technologies. Senate President Dominick Ruggerio formally appointed the seven committee members Tuesday — although the panel is so new it has yet to be listed on the General Assembly website.
The committee has yet to determine an initial meeting as of Wednesday afternoon, Senate spokesperson Greg Paré confirmed, but is in the process of scheduling the first rendezvous.
“I am humbled and honored to lead the Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies and I want to thank President Ruggerio for his confidence,” said Gu in a statement Tuesday.
The committee is tasked with scrutiny of “legislation and matters relating to emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, and their societal, ethical and policy implications,” according to a news release.
“One area that requires more focused attention is public policy around rapidly advancing technologies,” Ruggerio said in his speech on Jan. 7, the first day of session, before announcing Gu as his choice for chair of the new committee.
Investigating those technologies with Gu are committee Vice Chair John Burke of West Warwick, Secretary Lou DiPalma of Middletown and Sens. Gordon Rogers of Foster and Sam Zurier of Providence. The committee also includes two freshly elected faces: Sen. Lori Urso of Pawtucket and Sen. Lammis Vargas of Cranston. Rogers is the lone Republican on the committee.
“The rapid expansion of AI and other technologies across society has left lawmakers across the nation scrambling to design the legal and regulatory frameworks necessary to allow our residents to benefit from these powerful new tools while protecting them from their potential dangers,” Gu said in her statement.
Gu, the daughter of immigrants from China, was reared in South Kingstown schools before going on to obtain a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard University. In her time at the Ivy League school, Gu took classes on machine learning and coding. While on campus she also co-created Developers for Development, a tech collective with a focus on using technology to aid developing countries.
According to the Senator’s Linkedin, Gu worked in an assortment of tech positions after graduating Harvard, including engineer positions at the Human Diagnosis Project and review platform Yelp. Gu said in a phone interview Wednesday that she mainly does contract work now, and that her most recent contract wrapped up over six months ago.
Other committee members with tech experience include Burke, who spent about 40 years as a programmer and database designer before retiring in 2021, and DiPalma, a technical director at Raytheon’s Portsmouth facility, which is focused on a number of defense items in the manufacturer’s portfolio like radar, mine neutralization and shipboard integration.
RIBridges has many lines of defense. How was the system breached?
Gu stressed the importance of smart tech legislation, especially amid the RIBridges data breach in early December, which saw the personal data of approximately 657,000 people robbed by bad actors from the state’s public benefits network. Gu reaffirmed Wednesday that the RIBridges breach will be a major concern for the fledgling committee, and that it will pursue “whatever is needed to ensure that we have better cyber security practices and resources.”
AI-driven innovation has reshaped the cybersecurity industry in recent years. Major players in the security space like Palo Alto Networks and Sophos have incorporated machine learning into their software. AI’s usefulness in defense derives from its adeptness in areas like spotting unusual network traffic, which can signal the presence of intruders in a system.
In the 2024 legislative session, several AI-related bills popped up in the General Assembly, including S2888, sponsored by DiPalma, Gu and four other senators. The bill died in committee, but would have regulated companies which use AI to “conduct impact assessments and adopt risk management programs,” per the bill text.
“In terms of AI bills, I expect we will probably have some around how AI or automated algorithms are being used to make decisions in a lot of different realms,” Gu said, which means “algorithms trying to predict risk in a lot of different areas of either private industry or government.”
Industries like health care, housing and higher ed have invited scrutiny over the use of algorithmic decision making, and research has noted that bias can manifest in the models which comprise AI.
The question of how to regulate AI has been a question at the national level as well, at least as far back as the formation of a White House committee formed in 2018. More recently, in May 2024, a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee released a tentative roadmap on AI usage.
The Rhode Island Senate’s AI Committee is the latest addition to a spate of government-backed computer science initiatives in the Ocean State. The Institute for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies opened at Rhode Island College in November 2023 and has since added a dedicated AI degree program under its branding. Meanwhile, Gov. Dan McKee recruited an assortment of perspectives for an AI task force last February, with the group meeting for the first time in July 2024.
As for the ethical and regulatory issues that might ensue from new tech, Gu and her committee colleagues have plenty of issues to untangle. Some of the big ones nationally include the environmental impact of data centers, use of AI in eligibility decisions and deepfakes, and how to work around “hallucinations” — erroneous information output by generative AI.
But at the Rhode Island level, Gu said she expects RIBridges to be the protagonist in the committee’s early conversations.
Gu — first elected in 2022 as one of the first Asian Americans to win a General Assembly seat in Rhode Island, alongside Sen. Linda Ujifusa of Portsmouth — also serves on the Senate Committee on Environment and Agriculture and the Senate Committee on Housing and Municipal Government. She was one of the 23 senators who backed sitting president Ruggerio in the Senate Democratic caucus’ vote in November.
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