Feast Days, Historical Churches and Travel

Campus Life Updates

In honor of the great St. Albert’s feast day, students enjoyed a long weekend with Friday off. Taking advantage of the extra free time, students undertook numerous travels throughout Lazio and Italy, with some travelling as far as the ancient city of Pompeii. The community of CatholicTech has been growing, as students are finding new friends in the city of Rome, and as others reconnect with old mentors. The midterms have finally been completed, and now reading week and, after that, finals are looming closer by the minute.

Some students visited the city of Pompeii: walking around, taking public transportation, and even going atop the mountain. The sunny weather, the mountains, and the Amalfi coast came together in sonorous harmony with the remains of a decimated city. The buses swung wildly on the narrow rustic roads, with many people going here and there. During Friday, they toured the excavated ruins of Pompeii. On Saturday, they saw the crater from the volcano, Mt. Vesuvius, and then hiked a famous path called “Path of the gods” that was described as absolutely breathtakingly beautiful and runs along the mountains on the coast of the Mediterranean reaching the towns of Nocelle and Positano. On Sunday, they visited the Shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Holy Rosary of Pompeii where St. Bartolo Longo’s body is and we went to mass there.

On Friday, students enjoyed a vigil mass for Saint Albert the Great in his titular chapel on campus. One out of four chapels on campus, this holy space is austere, simple, and, due to the late fall weather, chilly and drafty–contributing to a deep and severe atmosphere of prayer.

Earlier this month, CatholicTech’s own Luis Lamb took part in the Builders AI Forum at the Gregoriana Pontifical Catholic University. Luis Lamb is an esteemed leader in Neurosymbolic AI innovation and entrepreneurship, and a devout Catholic who our institution is honoured to have as its Vice President of Research and a full professor of computer science. Delegates from multiple countries discussed the relationships and impacts of Artificial Intelligence, aligned with Catholic faith, values, and principles. Professor Lamb speaks of his experience: “I participated in ‘Building and Scaling Catholic AI: A Collaborative Roadmap.’ Catholic leaders from multiple walks of life assessed the current state and impact of AI in society, the economy, humanity and how the Church and its members can help define data governance principles for the Church.”

This work is deeply relevant to ensuring that the use of data related to the Catholic faith will be accurate, secure and aligned with the doctrine–a crucial concern in the era of informational control and AI-misuse. The workshop group also identified that those who develop AI systems aligned with the Church should seek to safeguard human dignity, share data resources ethically, and develop open models that are aligned with the doctrine. The group is now discussing the way forward and exchanging ideas on how to represent the knowledge that AI systems would manage under Catholic principles. This is called an ontology: a formalization of a shared vocabulary for organizing and connecting data, facilitating data management, communication, and allowing people and AI systems to reason about the data and knowledge used by AI systems. Professor Lamb’s work is pushing the horizon on matters that are not only central to the Catholic interaction with the world but also to the ethical use of AI broadly.

As usual, the Eternal City always magnetizes our community’s perusing on the weekend. On Saturday, students enjoyed exploring the various hidden treasures of Rome, such as old bookstores and hidden churches. The city proves continuously to be a refuge from the daily duties of campus, and now, a much needed period of calm is being enjoyed, before the reading week and finals season arrives. The end of the year is near, and this is more than apparent in the chill that creeps through the old halls of Via Santa Caterina 4.