By Julie Haupt
Ursula grew up on Long Island. She studied cognitive psychology and linguistics at MIT in the mid–late 1970s and was an undergraduate researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI) there. She received an MPhil in educational computing from Teachers College, Columbia University, and completed a PhD in computer science at Columbia University in 1991, specializing in natural language generation. She married Jim Dunne forty years ago. Their thirty-two-year-old son, Chris, lives in New Jersey and co-performs the podcast “Life in the World to Come.” He published his debut novel, Revelator Part I: Little Gods, in December 2024. Their twenty-five-year-old daughter, Barbara Cai, was adopted from China at eigtheen months old and is currently in Florida managing a veterinary clinic. Ursula and Jim have owned a vacation cabin in Arlington for the past twenty years. They moved into their Bennington home this September with their three-year-old cockapoo, Norma Petunia Goblin Joy Wodunne. Ursula describes herself as a Buddhist and is an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Bennington.
Since 1990 Ursula worked as a computer science educator. During her first and longest stint at the College of New Jersey, she chaired the computer science department and was a founder of its Interactive Multi-media Program. After that Ursula became intentionally itinerant, teaching at a variety of small colleges around the US. At the same time, she was developing software, working on methods of teaching computer science, and doing educational consulting. Her many accomplishments include being a participant in two National Academy workshops on computational thinking (2010, 2011) and a contributor/reviewer of the subsequent published reports.
In 2015 Ursula and her son, Chris, founded RiverSound Solutions. Their mission is to produce tech for people to become creators with, rather than consumers of, computing. Ursula states that current AI technology is intended to mediate communication between people. She aims instead to create tech that will facilitate in-person communication. She asserts that the large language models used by AI developers are flawed technology, very authoritarian in approach. She is committed to promoting a different approach and explaining it without jargon in a manner that laypeople can understand. The RiverSound Solutions team has worked for years on a software program, Partial Information Retrieval Including Provenance, with a patent just published in June 2025.
Ursula has long enjoyed fiber arts, including crocheting, embroidery, and quilting, and has participated in academic roundtables and panels demonstrating the connections between fiber arts and computer science concepts. She presented a webinar, TEXTILE TALK: Fiber Artists vs Artificial Intelligence: What We Know That It Doesn’t. In the talk she used case studies of her experiences in embroidery, quilting, and crochet to address the potentials and limitations of the impact of generative AI with large language models on fiber arts design and production. Generative AI can produce instructions and predict outcomes, but, unlike humans, it cannot react, reason, decide, and recover. The knowledge sharing of craft circles and the embodied comprehension of physical making—vital to working with that finicky medium of fiber—could inform the training that goes into the creation of AI. View the discussion and webinar.
On August 19 Ursula was featured on the front page of the Bennington Banner. The story, “The Coding is in the Bag,” describes a series of three workshops Ursula led introducing youngsters to the idea of computation by way of fiber arts at the Bennington Free Library this summer. “When people are talking and working with other people, they solve problems. They create beautiful things,” said Wolz. “You create algorithms by collaborating with other human beings, not by sitting alone at a computer or a sewing machine. Those moments together—that’s where the computation happens.” Several AAUW members assisted with the workshops.
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