With the recent releases of an artificial voice of President Biden telling people not to vote in New Hampshire and artificially generated nude photographs of entertainer Taylor Swift, the impact of AI on our lives is becoming ever clearer. Linda J. Young is chief mathematical statistician and director of Research and Development of the Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service and she chairs a group of representatives from Federal agencies that is developing a series of webinars on the use of artificial intelligence in Federal programs. For those of us in the Village, her expertise in this arena will help bring these Federal initiatives out of the shadows and give us a hint of what we can expect in the future.

 

Prior to joining the Department, Linda Young served on the faculties of three land grant universities: Oklahoma State University, University of Nebraska, and the University of Florida. She has three books and more than 100 publications in over 50 different journals, constituting a mixture of statistics and subject-matter journals. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.