Interdisciplinary seed grants propel UGA AI

As machine learning techniques and the reach of large language models (LLMs) become integrated into leading-edge research projects that span the university, the Institute for Artificial Intelligence is creating early leverage for collaborative faculty projects to access greater external support. Four university-wide research projects have been awarded seed grants under the new initiative:

“Artificial intelligence is not just about creating smarter machines, it’s about using technology to unlock human potential and address the challenges of our time,” said Khaled Rasheed, interim executive director of IAI. “This seed grant program represents a vital investment in interdisciplinary collaboration, empowering researchers to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and address the pressing challenges of our society.”

The projects funded by the inaugural IAI seed grants are:

• An Interdisciplinary Assessment of AI Cybersecurity Threats: Preparedness and Vulnerabilities in Georgia’s County Governments (Gregory Porumbescu, Jason Anastasopoulous and Andrew Whitford, School of Public and International Affairs; Elena Karahanna, Terry College of Business; and Roberto Perdisci, School of Computing)
• Developing Multimodality Large Language Models for Telemedicine (Tianming Liu, School of Computing; Juliet Sekandi, College of Public Health; and Eugene Douglass, College of Pharmacy)
• Combining AI Tools with Biofeedback to Determine the Drivers of Interest and Curiosity during Science Learning (Anna Abraham and Xiaoming Zhai, Mary Frances Early College of Education)
• Advances in Multimodal and Explainable ML Methods for Predicting Protein Post-Translational Modifications (Fei Dou, Gagan Agrawal and Ninghao Liu, School of Computing; and Natarajan Kannan, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences)

For the past 40 years, the institute has been a catalyst for research and scholarship in the constantly evolving and expanding field of AI and data science. At a celebration of IAI’s achievements held in the fall, S. Jack Hu, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, noted that UGA entered the world of AI in 1984. It was the same year Apple introduced the Macintosh computer, space shuttle Discovery made its maiden flight and Philips introduced the CD-ROM.

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Image: Boyd Research and Education Center. Photo by Dorothy Kozlowski, UGA