Tara Eberline, Partner-in-Charge of Foulston Siefkin’s Kansas City Office, will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by automated text generation within the legal practice from two perspectives—first, as an employment lawyer guiding her clients through challenges surrounding the implementation of AI in their businesses, and second, as a law firm leader who is grappling with the topic within her own firm. 

A 2006 Iowa Law alum, Tara Eberline is an experienced employment lawyer who advises public and private employers on complex workplace challenges at all stages of the employment relationship. When disputes arise, she represents clients before state and federal agencies and defends clients in workplace harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and other employment-related lawsuits. Tara also serves as the Partner-in-Charge of Foulston Siefkin’s Kansas City Office and a member of the firm’s executive committee.

Large language models such as BERT and GPT have taken the world by storm in just a few years. While their origins are at least 75 years old, these models with their deep neural network architectures are special in that they seem to exhibit general artificial intelligence. Their "knowledge" stored in  massive distributed representations, acquired by unsupervised training on extremely large data sets of texts, images, etc., that span many different languages have enabled a wide range of applications with a level of success not seen prior to the last 5 or so years. In this talk we have two broad objectives. The first is to provide a panoramic view of our research wherein we use large language models as a tool to address research objectives. In particular, we highlight our research on sensorial language style, on building community level language models, and on using these community models to de-bias text classifiers. The second objective is to highlight our research where we focus directly on improving our understanding of these large language models. Here we describe an ongoing project on assessing possible gender bias in large language models in the domain of perceptions of virtue.  We conclude the talk with our thoughts on the extent to which large language models exhibit general artificial intelligence.

Padmini Srinivasan is a Professor in the University of Iowa Department of Computer Science.

NIL produced nearly $1 billion in earnings for intercollegiate athletes in its inaugural year. Analysts argue that the shockingly high totals are the result of disproportionate institutional support for revenue-generating sports. Although NIL earnings can exceed six-figures for some athletes, first-year data reveals that significant gender disparities exist. 

Tan Boston is an assistant professor of law at Northern Kentucky University, where she teaches property and sports law. Her career includes stints in the NCAA’s governance and general counsel departments. Having written multiple law review articles on NIL and gender equity, her scholarship appears in or is forthcoming in the Louisiana Law Review, Richmond Law Review and the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. She will discuss NIL’s impact on female athletes and the Title IX implications of creative NIL financing.

The presentation can be viewed here.

In the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s new name, image and likeness era, Jeremy Bloom, a college football star and Olympic skier, has largely been forgotten. But it was Bloom’s plea for common sense relief from NCAA amateurism rules 20 years ago that first put the organization at an NIL crossroads that ultimately led to a series of strategic wrong turns and have left the NCAA begging Congress for relief from its missteps. University of Iowa professor Dan Matheson, a former NCAA associate director of enforcement, talked about the history behind today’s NIL era in college athletics and the challenges ahead for the NCAA.

View the presentation here.

Prior to July 1, 2021, NCAA college athletes were prohibited by the NCAA from monetizing from their name, image or likeness and from hiring an agent to represent them in their marketing efforts. With the passing of NIL, the door has opened for college athletes to make money, build their professional brands and work with agents and commercial brands on marketing campaigns.  

In this discussion, Khalil Wilkes will reflect on his prior Stanford football student athlete experience and current work with WME Sports agency and discuss the evolution of the college “student athlete” experience since the inception of NIL. Come to learn more about NIL, how it has changed the college athlete’s experience, and how agents and commercial brands are utilizing the influence of college athletes in this new era.

Watch the recording here.