Good Systems: Ethical AI at UT Austin is one of the three campus-wide Bridging Barriers Research Grand Challenges. Good Systems recently held an internal seed-funding competition for interdisciplinary faculty teams at UT pursuing projects at the convergence of AI design, human values, and societal need.
This year, out of six Good Systems seed grants announced, three feature principal investigators or co-PIs from the iSchool: professors Angela D.R. Smith, Earl Huff, Jr., and Ying Ding. Each seed grant provides up to $50,000 to support each project for one year and to help build toward further external funding.
Smith’s project, “Youth Perspectives on Text-to-Image AI: Co-Designing Ethical Generative AI for K–12 Students,” is in collaboration with a colleague at UT’s College of Education. According to the Bridging Barriers website, they aim to center the perspectives of K–12 students in the development and evaluation of generative AI tools, generating “youth-driven recommendations for more ethical AI development.”
Huff’s project, “Hack the Camp-us: Sociotechnical Interventions by and for People with Disabilities” is in collaboration with colleagues in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Social Work, Rhetoric and Writing, Design and Creative Technologies, the Disability Cultural Center, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The team promises to “utilize community-driven design to create AI-enabled interventions that address long-term infrastructural barriers for people with disabilities at UT.”
Ding’s project, “Knowledge-Informed Multimodal Responsible AI for COPD,” is in collaboration with colleagues in Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. They seek to “develop an AI framework that can improve chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) while reducing the ‘black-box’ opacity of current models to ensure clinical decisions are more transparent, trustworthy and patient-centered,” per Bridging Barriers.
Dr. Ken Fleischmann, interim dean and chair designate of the iSchool, is the founding chair of Good Systems. He salutes all the winners, and especially his iSchool colleagues.
“The iSchool has long focused on ethical AI and has been a key contributor since Good Systems launched in 2019, and I am delighted that three more outstanding colleagues’ research will be funded as a result of our seed grant program,” he says. “Huge congratulations to Angela, Earl, and Ying!”