Kieran Setiya is Peter de Florez Professor of Philosophy at MIT, where he works on ethics and related questions about human agency and human knowledge. He is the author of Reasons without Rationalism, Knowing Right From Wrong,Midlife: A Philosophical Guide and Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, which was selected as a Best Book of 2022 by The Economist and The New Yorker. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the LA Review of Books, the TLS, the London Review of Books, the Boston Review, The Atlantic, Aeon, and The Yale Review, as well as numerous academic journals. He is working on a book about laughter as a guide to life.

Can humour help us cope with hardship without distancing or denial? Does laughter at misfortune manifest what Bergson called “a momentary anesthesia of the heart”—or worse? This talk takes up a puzzle about confessional comedy: why isn’t it vicious to draw pleasure from another’s suffering, as we do when comics joke about trauma? The answer turns on the fine structure of empathy; and the upshot is a theory of confessional stand-up as bespoke theodicy: a temporary, interpersonal solution to the emotional problem of evil. This solution is one we can administer to ourselves, using humour to confront adversity. Content note: violence and sexual assault.

Bryan Sears covers the governor and General Assembly, state politics and transportation for Maryland Matters. He has covered the Maryland State House for the last two decades at the Baltimore Sun Media Group, Patch.com and most recently, The Daily Record. Sears has won multiple state and national awards for police and crime reporting, local and state government coverage and investigative reporting that resulted in a guilty plea by a government official for stealing from his own campaign account. He’s a frequent radio and television contributor.

John-John Williams IV is a political reporter at The Baltimore Banner. A native of Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of Howard University, he has lived in Baltimore for the past 17 years. Before coming to The Baltimore Banner, John-John worked for The Baltimore Sun covering education, fashion, home, food, travel, popular culture and DEI. Before coming to Baltimore, he worked at The Times-Picayune, and The Argus Leader. He interned at The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press and The Post Standard. In his free time he likes to travel, eat in restaurants, binge television shows and experience life.

Hannah Gaskill, Government Affairs Reporter, The Daily Record

William J. Ford has reported for more than 25 years on local, county and state politics. Before Maryland Matters, he spent nearly 10 years covering municipalities, regional news and occasional news features with sports angles at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He wrote for Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, and was a reporter for seven years with The Washington Informer, covering local politics and other D.C.-area topics. He often appears on local radio and TV programs to discuss Maryland politics.

With the 2026 statewide election cycle behind us, state and local media outlets will once again turn their attention to Maryland’s annual 90-day legislative session. The journalists on this beat bear an immense responsibility to inform the public about issues and candidates that directly impact their daily lives, all while working within real constraints. Smaller newsrooms, finite resources, and a sometimes inattentive public make their work challenging.  Moreover, the nature of their work is also uniquely up close and personal. The state house press corps encounter the same lawmakers, advocates, and staffers in the same hallways session after session, and the sources they rely on today are often the same ones they scrutinize tomorrow.

Join the UMBC Institute of Politics for a panel discussion on journalistic ethics in state political reporting, featuring journalists covering the Maryland General Assembly and state elections.

Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis and the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.  She is founder of the Catherine Project and taught at UMBC from 2005-2011.

Phrases like “liberal education” or the “liberal arts” come from the word for freedom.  What kind of freedom could education cultivate?  What kinds of unfreedom do we face today from which education could liberate us?

Rama G. Elluru is currently the Senior Advisor for AI and Intellectual Property at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). SCSP is a non-profit, non-partisan initiative established to make recommendations to strengthen America’s long-term competitiveness for a future where artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies reshape our national security, economy, and society. At SCSP, she leads a team on shaping emerging technology governance and Intellectual Property policy. Previous to the SCSP, Rama was a Director for Research and Analysis for Ethics and Responsible AI at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), an independent Commission established by Congress to consider the methods and means to advance the development of AI, ML, and associated technologies to address the national security and defense needs of the United States. She was detailed to the NSCAI from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), where she served as an Administrative Patent Judge on the Patent Trial and Appeal. Before joining the USPTO, Rama practiced IP law for 20 years, specializing in analyzing and litigating E.E. and bio-pharma patents. Her career started as a Software Engineer. She graduated from Trinity University with a B.S. in Computer Science/Philosophy and obtained a J.D. from the Washington and Lee School of Law.  After law school, she received a M.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Georgetown University.

David Danks is the Polk JSF Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, AI, & Data Science at the University of Virginia. One part of his research examines the ethical, psychological, and policy issues around AI and robotics across multiple sectors. He also develops novel AI systems and computational cognitive models. Danks was an inaugural member of the National AI Advisory Committee (USA), and currently serves on multiple advisory boards for industry, government, and academia. He was the recipient of a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award, as well as an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Anupam Joshi is the Oros Family Professor and Vice Provost and Chief AI Officer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).  He also serves as the Director of UMBC’s Center for AI.

He was previously the Acting Dean of the College of Engineering and IT, and Chair of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. He is an Adjunct Professor at IIT Delhi’s School of IT, and Affiliate Professor in UMBC’s School of Aging and UMB’s School of Medicine.  He is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS. He has published over 300 technical papers with an h-index of 98 and over 34000 citations (per Google scholar), been granted nine patents, and has obtained research support over $22M from National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), US Dept of Defense (DoD), NIST, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin amongst others.

Dr. Joshi obtained a B.Tech degree from IIT Delhi in 1989, and a Masters and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1991 and 1993 respectively.
His research interests are at the intersection of AI and Systems. He did some of the earliest work in data management and security for mobile and ad-hoc networks using AI approaches, which was cited in his selection as a Fellow of IEEE. Over the last decade, he has been exploring this intersection to improve Cybersecurity — using Distributed AI approaches for attack detection and resilience in CPS/IoT systems, and policy driven approaches to security and privacy. This work has led not just to papers but technology transfer to small Maryland companies. He has also applied AI approaches to various facets of medicine. He has worked with scholars from areas as diverse as medicine, psychology, linguistics, gerontology, and public policy to explore AI based approaches in those domains that has led to publications and extramural funding.  He has active international collaborations with colleagues in Japan, India and Europe. In his administrative roles, Dr. Joshi has driven AI Strategy across the enterprise, worked to create innovative programs (Data Science, AI, Minor in Computing for non STEM majors) at UMBC, overseen significant growth, and worked with external stakeholders and the legislature to raise support for the growth of Engineering and Computing at UMBC.