All interested faculty are welcome to join our team and we encourage you to contact either Angela Bielefeldt or Alessandro Roncone for initial information, orientation and subscription to our mailing list.聽

In 2023, the EE-AIL IRT Seed grant program will award grants ranging from $4,000 to $50,000 to teams of faculty聽for a total of about $120,000. In particular, for year three we will expand our offering to support three distinct activities:

  • Research Grants ($20,000 to $50,000): The IRT is interested and invested in funding new, early-stage, interdisciplinary collaborations within the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) and beyond. Seed grants can include purposes such as funding for pilot studies, student support, research tool development, or collaboration-building activities that may lead to future proposals. Particular focus will be given to proposals focused on supporting graduate students or postdocs for an entire semester (or close to it). Faculty salary is allowed but not recommended.
  • Proposal Writing Grants (up to four聽weeks of summer salary): Complementary to research-focused grants, we will facilitate and support grant writing efforts from faculty, in the form of faculty summer salary that must be devoted to proposal writing. These four weeks can be spread among multiple faculty. Importantly, we acknowledge that writing interdisciplinary proposals is particularly challenging听补苍诲 we would be happy to work聽with you聽to draft a strong and convincing plan of work to succeed in your grant writing activity.
  • Travel Grants (up to $4,000): We encourage our IRT faculty to participate in and attend conferences that are relevant to the mission of the IRT. We hope this activity will facilitate future spillover of research ideas from AI to education and vice-versa. To this end, we will support travel for faculty to attend conferences 鈥渙n the other side鈥� 鈥撀燗I researchers聽attending education conferences, and vice-versa.

In all these efforts, the lead should be a member of the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS), but additional collaborators may be inside or beyond CEAS (including outside CU at K12 schools or in industry). Faculty are encouraged to take a broad and creative perspective on how these funds can support the goals of the IRT.聽 The purpose of seed grant proposals is not just limited to these activities, grants can聽also include non-traditional activities such as web page content development, acquisition of professional illustrations for upcoming proposals, video production, outreach material, etc.聽

Investment goals聽

  • Catalyze new research collaborations at the intersection of EER and AI
  • Enhance the reputation of CU in Engineering Education and Artificial Intelligence research
  • Grow infrastructure and research capacity (people, expertise, equipment)
  • Compete for 鈥榗enter-scale鈥� and other large research grants

Phase two聽seed grant funded projects聽(2021-2022)

  • "Developing AI agents to Support Teaching Staff in Large Programming Classes"聽鈥� Ashutosh Trivedi (CS), Gowtham Kaki (CS), Fabio Somenzi (ECEE)
  • "Proposal Writing Grant for NSF Research Coordination Network (NSF 17-59a4)"聽鈥� Tom Yeh (CS)
  • 鈥淒esign of an AI-Augmented Learning Thread for Environmental Engineering Curriculum鈥� 鈥� Azadeh Bolhari (CEAE 鈥� EVEN), Gunther Thiele (Freie Universitat Berlin)
  • 鈥淭arget-word Selection and Story Generation for Vocabulary Growth Support for Bilingual Preschoolers鈥澛犫�� Katharina Kann (CS) and Eliana Colunga (Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience)
  • 鈥淎utomatic Processing of Free-text Student Responses to In-class Surveys鈥澛犫�� Katherine Goodman (ATLAS), Jean Hertzberg (MCEN), Katharina Kann (CS)

Phase one聽seed grant聽funded projects聽(2020-2021)