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Simon Cullen

Co-Founder & President | Disagree Wisely

Faculty Research Fellow | Heterodox Academy

Visiting Research Professor | UNC-CH

Nicholas DiBella

Co-founder and Chief Technology and Operations Officer of Disagree Wisely and AI Research Scientist at Heterodox Academy

1:30pm ET

Zoom Registration:

luma.com/wxfcopfs

19 Feb 2026

Beyond Bots: Facilitative AI for Student-to-Student Civil Discourse

AI in Education Custom Bots/GPTs

Participants will:

Discover a novel approach to transforming difficult conversations
Gain hands-on experience with the Sway AI platform through small group discussions
Explore strategies for deploying it in courses and campus programming

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Zoom Registration:

luma.com/wxfcopfs

About the session:��Join us for an interactive workshop with philosopher, psychologist, and AI researcher Simon Cullen. He will discuss and demonstrate Sway, the AI-facilitated group chat platform he designed with Nicholas DiBella to help students engage constructively on controversial topics. The session will include research findings and a live demonstration showing how the platform fosters open inquiry and productive disagreement in college classrooms and other settings.

AI-facilitated dialogue represents a meaningful leap forward in tools for supporting human-to-human conversation. Sway's intuitive interface offers real-time suggestions to help students refine their messages before sending. The platform also incorporates a sophisticated AI facilitator that keeps discussions on track, prompts students to articulate and examine the reasoning behind their views, redirects conversations that drift from the central issues, and supplies relevant context to anchor the exchange.

This workshop is ideal for faculty, administrators, and student affairs professionals looking for practical tools to foster open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in their work.

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Zoom Registration:

luma.com/wxfcopfs

About the presenters:��Simon Cullen, Ph.D., is co-founder and President of Disagree Wisely, Faculty Research Fellow at Heterodox Academy's Segal Center for Academic Pluralism in New York City, and Visiting Research Professor of Civil Discourse and Artificial Intelligence in The School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill. He developed the award-winning Dangerous Ideas in Science and Society course, helping students to explore diverse viewpoints on polarizing topics by teaching them the art of constructive disagreement. His research combines philosophy, cognitive science, and educational technology to improve reasoning and communication across moral and political divides. His work has been published in Science Advances, Nature Science of Learning, Cognition, and the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and has a background in the psychology of reasoning, reasoning pedagogy, and philosophy of cognitive science.

Nicholas DiBella, Ph.D., is co-founder and Chief Technology and Operations Officer of Disagree Wisely and AI Research Scientist at Heterodox Academy. Formerly, he was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellow based in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bilkent University. His research spans epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of probability, with a focus on developing methods to improve reasoning and communication in contexts involving uncertainty. His work has been published in The Philosophical Review, Philosophy of Science, and Synthese. He holds a B.S. in Physics from MIT and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University. Drawing on his interdisciplinary background, Nicholas works at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence to enhance decision-making and foster constructive dialogue across diverse perspectives.