Illinois' AI Policy Landscape with Jeremy Riel

In this episode of Illinois Policy Unpacked, Jeremy Riel, assistant professor of educational psychology at UIC, dives into the evolving AI policy landscape in Illinois. He highlights the goals of IGPA’s new science and technology working group, which he co-leads, and shares how his recent grant will empower educators and lawmakers to better navigate emerging technologies for the public good.

Transcript

Kristen Chandler

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Illinois Policy Unpacked podcast, where we inform the policy conversation in Illinois and beyond. I’m your host, Kristen Chandler.

For today’s episode, we’re joined by Jeremy Riel, assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. As director of the TRAILblazer Lab, he’s reimagining how AI can shape the future of learning. His work spans neuro-symbolic AI, computational thinking, and simulation-based learning, all with a focus on creating engaging, real-world educational experiences. 

Jeremy will share insights on his new role as co-lead of the Science and Technology working group at IGPA. As part of this work, he’s focused on the critical role of public policy and legislation in guiding the development and use of artificial intelligence. Later on, we’ll explore how thoughtful policy can ensure AI benefits society while also managing its risks. Jeremy Riel, welcome to the podcast.

Jeremy Riel

Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to happy to be here and chat about AI and learning and tech and all the other cool stuff that's happening right now in the world.

Kristen Chandler

Awesome. Thank you so much. Let's get started with the current initiatives. Could you briefly explain your work with the TRAILblazer Lab at UIC? 

Jeremy Riel

Yeah, the TRAILblazer Lab is a group that I founded about a year ago. It stands for “Teaching and Research with AI Learning,” and the focus is, you know, it's a trailblazer, right? So, we're trying to chart new roads. We're trying to make new paths for using AI in education in a mindful way and thinking about what new AI technologies, especially after LLMs really came to be prominent in, I'd say, late 2022 into 2023 when open AI released chat GPT, kind of opened this whole new world of possibilities with education. Every educator on the planet is probably thinking about it now on how it can help with learning, and so I founded the lab to build AI tools that could be used, not only in classrooms to help with learning, but also with teachers, to help them do their everyday tasks, so that they can really focus on the things that matter, like working directly with students or providing customized support to students as needed, right? 

In my lab, we've got a few projects running where we're taking emerging AI tools. We're keeping a pulse on anything that's coming out to see about its applicability for learning. And it kind of fuses also my other research interest in simulation. So for the last 10-15, years or so, I've really studied the use of simulation for learning, and the idea behind that is that, you know, we tend to learn better from hands-on experiences and doing things, rather than just being lectured to or, you know, just reading information on the web or just watching videos instead of just receiving information. When you do something with it, and you're actively engaged, it can definitely help create a more memorable experience. So, I use simulations in a lot of my research, where it's not just, you know, like VR headset simulations, but simulating social situations, doing role plays, using story and narrative in like, you know, educational activities and things like that. Simulation thought broadly. Okay, AI comes out right? 2022, this great technology that can craft words in an instant. Oh, this could actually be really cool for simulation and role play. So, my projects kind of synthesize that and create opportunities for students to engage with AI-based characters or create situations where teachers can be assisted by, say, like an AI bot in their class, so that way they can keep an eye on, you know, things a little better, or understand what their students’ needs are.

Kristen Chandler

Great. So, it sounds like teachers can use it in an assistive way, not replacing teachers.

Jeremy Riel

That's a good question, right? That's everybody right now: “whoa, what's going to happen to education?” Is all school gonna just be a bot? And in our lab, absolutely not. We're trying to find ways that work alongside teachers and work with students rather than just replacing them, you know, wholesale. We don't want any of that. We believe that humans need to stay in the loop. Humans are a necessary component in the educational process, and even just learning alone isn't always as effective, because learning together, we're inherently social beings with emotions, and we're all used to having people to interact with, and so if we remove that from the equation, we're actually removing a lot of things that we need to be picking up on and learning. So humans need to stay in that process of education, and that's the kind of tools we're thinking about, is how to supplement and amplify the learning that's already happening and give the teacher new tools to be able to do that and work with their students on a more personalized level.

Kristen Chandler

Okay, great. Yeah, thanks for clarifying that you teach in educational psychology department at UIC and explore how to combine emerging technologies for engaging learning environments, as you had just mentioned. What are your primary research areas, and what sparked your interest in them?

Jeremy Riel

Well, at the beginning of my research career, I was really interested because I'm an old video gamer. I came into my PhD thinking about I had definite interests in technology but also thinking about how games play and other forms of engaging game based learning could be used. And so, I got put into a project pretty early on called Global Ed, which was a simulation for middle school social studies. It had schools from around the country actually were interacting in an online space, doing a giant role play. And I got really engaged with this, because I love role playing games. I loved this stuff growing up, and it’s so engaging, it's really a different way to get people doing things in a situation. Of course, the question that we kept having in the lab was, “oh, hey, maybe, you know, we should keep thinking about how simulations and role plays and things like that can really influence learning?” So that was that track of research for about 10 years while I was a doctorate student, and then after I graduated, I continued to pursue that line of work, and thinking about game based learning simulations and how technology can support that. So, my interest in education technology is another area of work, but it was always thinking about also how it can support people's interactions within a learning environment or a classroom. And so that's where kind of this unique nexus of stuff came together: my interest in technology, my interest in role play and simulation. 

And then this thing called Chat GPT came out in about 2022, 2023 right? And it was the tool we'd been looking for the longest time, because to run an effective simulation like that, or games, you know, it requires a lot of human labor to just manage those kinds of things. When these kind of tools start coming out, we're like, “Oh, hey, this actually might get a little easier doing the more mundane monitoring tasks and keeping things on track and nudging and encouraging people to participate, that kind of stuff.” Then this third area of research started coming into my space of AI and I took a deep dive about five, six years ago, before Chat GPT even came out, because there was a lot of energy around this, this space, and thinking this could be a really good, cool opportunity for engaging learning in many ways. So that's, that's kind of the crux of my lab, or the gist of my work in my lab is thinking about these three areas of AI, emerging technologies, you know, simulation or game based learning.

Kristen Chandler

Yeah, absolutely. You've detailed how you became interested in science and technology and education. Let's talk a little bit about how you mix public policy in with that. IGPA formed the new science and technology working group earlier this year, which you co lead, with Steven Schwinn from the Urbana campus as part of that work. What is the Science and Technology working group aiming to analyze?

Jeremy Riel

The new working group, which we just started in, I'd say January this year, 2025, was aimed to its faculty from all of the three system campuses that do research on AI in different ways. We kind of clustered together and said, “hey, you know, we're doing AI research together, you know, in different ways, but we need more oublic discourse on AI, and who better to provide expertise in this area than the several professors at the universities, at our flagship universities in the state?” And a lot of us, you know, have our own spheres of work that we're doing, and like I focus on AI, but we have folks that are focused on actual hard computing, and we have folks interested in quantum. We have folks interested in public policy already, but the idea was, let's join that conversation. Let's join the public discourse and dialog on AI, emerging technologies, et cetera, because there's so many unknowns with AI right now, and if we're the ones. 

Studying this, we almost felt a responsibility that we need to jump into the conversation and not just let our work live in our labs or at, you know, the universities and publish papers behind paywalls, but to join that conversation, to help the state be competitive and to move maybe the meter a little bit on public policy, toward supporting businesses in Illinois, towards supporting safety and responsible use of AI. Those kinds of things, conversations that need to happen and inform policymakers, state agencies, school districts, you know, groups that need to have those conversations, but maybe don't have AI experts on staff, and so that was the idea behind the working group, is that we could quickly respond to questions about emerging technology like AI that you know, pop up when a new news article comes out about open AI releases, like the new model, Chat GPT 5 last week, right? A lot of questions popped up. What's new about it? What are the safety concerns? What do we need to think about it? And that's what our group is hoping to be able to answer in quick response when questions come up, but to also drive that conversation a little bit, and, you know, maybe provide some frameworks for how to think about these things in a productive way.

Kristen Chandler

Absolutely. And as you mentioned, like these technologies are very new, and so we're very excited to have this new working group, and have you join and lead it and help IGPA share with legislators how best to regulate this type of technology. As you mentioned, one of the group's focus areas is artificial intelligence, also known as AI. How would you describe the current public policy landscape around AI?

Jeremy Riel

In Illinois, there has kind of been no public policy landscape, and that's one of the reasons we wanted to jump it. We're not saying that the state needs to regulate. We want to instead have a conversation about what good regulation looks like, and we want to engage that conversation with legislature members, with policymakers, with agency folks, and think about what good regulation looks like, because we don't want to over regulate, but at the same time, we do want to ensure that there are at least certain safety protocols in place to prevent harms that can happen. 

One of the things that we're immediately thinking about is looking at what the other states have done so far. In Illinois, we don't have really any legislation, except for there was a task force formed when Chat GPT first came out. The state brought a bunch of people together to do a research report on the kind of state of AI in Illinois and what things we need to be considering. But actual regulations have been few in Illinois, so just because we haven't really taken any action in the state, we are trying to do a landscape review of just kind of what's happened in the last three years. That's one thing our working group has tackled right away, and to basically provide a menu of just, here's all the steps that other states have taken. We can do a little analysis on that and see, you know, the pros and cons of each of these decisions, and that's exactly what we're trying to do. We don't want to tell anybody exactly what has to happen, but provide, as IGPA does, nonpartisan and evidence based information right about any decisions that could be made, and drawing from the expertise of this working group, which were good, 15-16, members strong. Now, all our working group members have been working together to provide feedback on all of these things from their various discipline areas, which has been really cool as well.

Kristen Chandler

Yeah, I know you're early on in the landscape survey right now and still working on it right now. Could you share any of the preliminary results from your survey?

Jeremy Riel

Yeah, we got a few. It's funny, because, you know, one of the first things that you would do when something new comes out is you form a committee. You form a group to examine it. And that's what a lot of states have done since this brand-new tool came out. We need to look at it a little deeper. So many states did enact legislation to just study the phenomenon. What is actually happening with AI? What are the possible impacts? What are the implications socially for it? What are the implications for business? We have some safety things that have kind of in common among states, especially around child safety related to AI. So, some legislation is preventive, you know, it moves to prevent people from being defrauded with AI. With the rise of deep fakes and the rise of AI generated content, some states have criminalized or allowed for civil action on the use of AI for fraud purposes, and so that's a safety feature, right? 

Another is, like I said, child safety. Really unsavory things that can be done with AI in regards to children have also been legislated in several states. And I know that that was even being discussed in Congress recently with the Big, Beautiful Bill passage. There was a little segment in there on AI regulation, and that was a big concern for a lot of congress people on this idea of child safety. So, we're seeing that in several states as well. There's some preliminary results. We are still compiling our list, but we've been literally reading every bill that's been passed over the last three years to try to just see what's been happening.

Kristen Chandler

Yeah, thanks for detailing. As you mentioned, you know, it's a new technology, and while it has a lot of positive applications, there's also a downside to it as well. So, it's really important to be studied. Switching gears a little bit, you were recently awarded a grant through IGPA. Could you please tell us a little bit about the recent grant that you received on responsible AI research, innovation and education in Illinois?

Jeremy Riel

Yeah, this is really exciting for us, because it's kind of an offshoot of the group, or our working group’s project over the last year to look at the landscape while talking with folks at different events and just, you know, Chicago is a great hub for AI events. You know, like every weekend, you probably could find an AI event if you wanted to go. So my colleagues and I, we frequent these events and just having conversations with people we're seeing across industries, and this isn't just in education specifically, but healthcare, FinTech, all the things that Chicago is good at. They're seeing a huge need for upskilling their workforce for making sure that the incoming workforce is well prepared for AI and just making sure that we are meeting the economic and industry needs. 

As you know, across the educational system, it's not just in K-12, but also higher ed, and then also professional and continuing learning that happens in the actual workforce, right? So with the study, we're going to be doing a series of products, but the whole idea is to investigate and make recommendations for educational initiatives to support Illinois's need for AI education across industries, and, you know, bringing stakeholders in from several different industries to have conversations with us and do kind of deep dives on what different industries may need and those similarities. Where can we get the biggest bang for our buck, if there's an investment? What kind of the regulation might be necessary or not necessary to kind of balance? We want to take a balanced approach. We want to find those right combinations of things through the several research products that we'll be producing in the grant to inform policy in Illinois, specifically toward meeting the educational needs for the state, so that we stay competitive, we get businesses to stay here that we are ready for AI. I know readiness is already out the window, because it's already happened, right? But we can try to catch up as fast as possible with all the changes that are happening with AI and bringing people to the table in some of the work we've already done, bringing people to the table has been the best thing that we can do. 

Kristen Chandler

We’re really excited to see the results of the grant, and we hope it is really useful for educators and legislators across the state to have a better understanding of the impact of AI in education. Is there anything else you'd like to share about your work or the grants or the science and technology working group that we haven't mentioned yet?

Jeremy Riel

Yeah, I just in general, we're still just starting out. We're entering our second semester with the working group. I know that there's a lot of great energy with all the team members. I'm really grateful for everybody coming together so quickly to respond to this. I think in general, you know, it was a lot of us in having conversations about getting involved with policy none of us are directly policy people, right? Some of us may study legislation that comes out, or keep an eye on what's happening in Congress, or keep an eye on what's happening in the state house, but you know, we do our research in our own areas, but I think among all of the working group members, folks wanted to join because there was almost a sense of responsibility, like and wanting to do more as faculty members. Like, it's too easy for like me to live in my bubble and do my research. And okay, I have a few grad students who like to read my work and whatever, and maybe a few scholars around the world who will read my research. But like, it kind of limits there. I think a lot of us wanted, in this era to, like, really have an impact, and so not only a sense of responsibility, but just wanting the work to grow and do more and be amplified outside of the academic sphere. So this is a great opportunity also for our faculty in the working group to kind of not just influence public dialog around this, you know, these issues of AI or emerging technology, but really maybe drive some of these technologies too, just being considerate of the different aspects that that people research, and the different social implications, or the different business implications, industry implications, things like that, and producing high quality products that can actually inform that conversation, not just in the legislature, but also in the public. 

I think, you know, having stuff publicly available like that can help inform people better. You know, one of the big things that you hear a lot lately is AI literacy. And everybody needs AI literacy. We need to get there. Well, we need good resources to be able to do that. And so, for our citizenry to be informed, for people to have those AI skills, we need to have good stuff out there for people to learn from. And I think it's stuff like this that is geared toward understanding highly technical stuff, but not simplified, but put into a way that's understandable by an audience that doesn't study computer science all day. I think there's a huge value to this thinking about those kind of things, and how do we translate these complicated topics into distilling them down into stuff that is a little more understandable and digestible.

Kristen Chandler

Absolutely yes. We are grateful at IGPA to be able to pull faculty members from all three of the University of Illinois system universities and take faculty members who are so technical but really great at boiling things down, but also share this public policy aspect. So, we appreciate your work and everyone else’s.

Jeremy Riel

We appreciate in just the short time we've been working with IGPA, the expertise that IGPA has, and the focus on helping us translate that stuff. So I know that's a big issue in academic work, is the translation effort to make it more reachable by anybody who wants to pick up a paper and understand the work of faculty. And IGPA is great at that. You've been doing it for over 80 years now. So I'm loving the partnership.

Kristen Chandler

Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been a great conversation. Jeremy, where can listeners learn more about your work?

Jeremy Riel

The best place is our website, Trailblazerlab.org. My faculty page has list of contact information as well. Google Scholar for the works I published in the academic sphere. Our IGPA website for the working group will also, over time, be publishing some of these AI products also. So I encourage anybody who's listening to keep an eye out for the stuff that's going to be coming out, not only from our working group, like the AI landscape study that I mentioned earlier, but we also want to come up with an AI dictionary of you have actual legal terms and legal definitions that have been generated by different states around AI and emerging technologies. We're also going to be publishing a lot of these research projects with that grant. You mentioned that we'll be starting up this year, so we're hoping to get a lot of cool stuff coming out for the general public and not just for academic audiences, and we'll be able to find that on the IGPA website.

Kristen Chandler

Awesome, great. We hope you found today’s conversation on artificial intelligence in education insightful. A big thank-you to our guest, Jeremy Riel, assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago, for shedding light on the importance of legislating this new technology. Stay tuned for more discussions that inform the policy conversation in Illinois and beyond. Until next time, thanks for listening.