There is a particular kind of restlessness that comes when you know something needs to exist but does not yet.

I have been living with that restlessness for a while now.

For most of my adult life, I have worked at the intersection of communication and public life,  first as a broadcast journalist, then in public diplomacy, and now as a doctoral researcher and instructor. Each of those chapters looked different on the surface. But underneath them all was the same core question: how do people make sense of the world through the information they receive, and what happens when that process is disrupted?

For the past several years, the disruption has had a name: artificial intelligence.

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What I Kept Seeing

When I entered the Ph.D. program, I expected to spend most of my intellectual energy on the research questions I came in with, political communication, media effects, identity formation. And I did. But something else kept pulling at my attention.

I watched students become anxious in ways that were difficult to name. Not anxious about grades or deadlines, but about something more fundamental. They were questioning whether their ideas were truly theirs. They were unsure how to present themselves in professional environments where AI tools were simultaneously expected and suspected. They were navigating a world that kept shifting beneath their feet without anyone giving them a map.

I watched colleagues, experienced, thoughtful educators struggle with the same uncertainty. How do you design a course for a technology that changes faster than syllabi can be revised? How do you maintain academic integrity without punishing students for using tools the professional world will expect them to master? How do you talk honestly about AI when the institutional guidance keeps changing?

And I recognized in both students and colleagues something I had felt myself: a growing sense of uncertainty not about technology, but about agency. About whether the humans inside these systems still had meaningful control over their own thinking, learning, and professional identity.

That experience has a name. At the CAID Center, we call it algorithmic anxiety.

The Moment I Decided to Build Something

There was no single dramatic moment. It was more like a slow accumulation of conversations in classrooms, in research seminars, in hallways, where I kept thinking: someone needs to build a space for this.

And then, quietly, I realized that someone could be me.

I had spent a decade working in public diplomacy, helping institutions communicate complex ideas to broad audiences. I had spent years in journalism, learning how to make difficult topics accessible without losing their depth. I was now deep in academic research, developing frameworks for understanding how media environments shape human behavior.

I did not need to wait for someone else to build the bridge between those worlds. I could build it myself.

That is what the CAID Center is.

What CAID Is, And What It Is Not

The Center for Communication, AI & Digital Identities is an independent research and professional hub. It is not a technology company. It is not affiliated with any institution. It does not promote AI tools or advocate for any particular platform.

What it does is ask the questions that get lost in the excitement and the panic surrounding artificial intelligence:

What does it mean to maintain human agency within algorithmically driven environments?

How do educators design ethical, meaningful learning experiences in an AI era without losing the human-centered foundation of what education is for?

How are our digital identities being shaped often without our awareness by systems we interact with every day?

These are communication questions. They are pedagogical questions. They are human questions.

CAID exists to examine them seriously, translate the research into practical tools, and build a community of people who refuse to let the conversation be dominated only by technologists and engineers.

Who This Is For

When I imagine the CAID community, I think of the instructor who spent a weekend rewriting her syllabus AI policy for the third time this year and still does not feel confident about it.

I think of the doctoral student who used an AI tool to help organize his literature review and spent the next week wondering if that decision would follow him.

I think of the media professional trying to explain to her organization why their communication strategy needs to account for the way algorithms are changing what audiences see and believe.

I think of the undergraduate student, first generation, multilingual, navigating higher education while also carrying the weight of family expectations and cultural identity who is trying to figure out who she is in a world that keeps redefining the rules.

CAID is for all of them. And honestly, it is for me and you too.

What Comes Next

Today, July 1, the CAID Center went live at caidcenter.com.

At launch, you will find three blog posts covering our core research tracks — algorithmic anxiety, critical digital pedagogy, and AI and digital identity. You will find information about our upcoming webinar on responsible AI in the academy. You will find the CAID Brief, our quarterly newsletter for educators and researchers. And you will find open-access resources designed to be immediately useful rather than simply impressive.

This is a beginning, not a finished product. I say that not as a disclaimer but as an invitation. The CAID Center will grow through the contributions, collaborations, and conversations of the community it serves.

If you have been sitting with questions about AI, identity, and what it means to remain human in increasingly automated environments, you are exactly who I built this for.

Come find us at caidcenter.com. I would love to hear from you.