UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CSRAI) has introduced the outcomes of its most up-to-date seed-funding competitors. The middle awarded greater than $152,000 to seven interdisciplinary analysis projects representing six faculties.
Each proposal was evaluated by friends for its connection to the middle’s mission, mental advantage and potential for securing exterior funding. The awards will help the formation of interdisciplinary analysis groups and early-stage projects that display sturdy potential to get hold of exterior funding. Projects are anticipated to begin spring 2026 and final one to two years.
“We had another record-setting year in terms of the volume of submissions, making our seed grant program extremely competitive,” stated S. Shyam Sundar, CSRAI director and James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects within the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications.
The successful proposals got here from a variety of collaborations involving school from a wide range of disciplines in science, engineering, info science and expertise, well being and human growth, liberal arts and communication. They had been all evaluated positively via a blind peer evaluate course of, not solely for advancing AI, but additionally for their social implications, together with the extent to which they’re responsive to societal wants and their potential for social good.
“Human-centered AI was the winner this year,” stated Sundar. “Whether the proposal is to plan for public transportation or urban disasters, or to improve the effectiveness of parent-focused psychotherapy or enhance language learning by non-speaking children, the projects all focus on aligning AI with human social values.”
Synopses of the awarded proposals are shared under, with further info out there on the center’s website.
“AI Augmented Urban Resilience Agents with Model-Based Behavioral Priors and Theory-Driven Adaptation for Urban Disasters”
This venture goals to create a system that makes use of superior AI fashions mixed with real-world information and psychological insights to simulate how folks reply and adapt throughout disasters. The brokers will mix practical information with behavioral science to produce clear, interpretable simulations that enhance city emergency planning, threat communication, and resilience in numerous catastrophe situations and concrete settings.
“Ambiguities and Tensions in Trans Crowdfunding: Viral Visibility Under Surveillance”
This venture explores how trans and gender non-conforming (TGN) people use on-line crowdfunding to relocate to safer areas whereas dealing with rising scrutiny and surveillance. Using interviews and discourse evaluation, the analysis examines how platform methods and AI-driven oversight form the alternatives and dangers skilled by TGN crowdfunders, aiming to present new perception into survival methods, care practices, and help wants for TGN communities.
“Expanding Empathic AI 2026 – A Research Roadmap”
This venture proposes a cross-disciplinary convention centered on advancing understanding of empathy in human–AI interactions. Bringing collectively students from philosophy, the social sciences, engineering, and pc science, the occasion will look at each the science and ethics of extending empathy to AI methods and deciphering empathy expressed by LLMs and robots. The convention will characteristic talks, panels, early-career flash classes, and collaborative workgroups designed to spark new partnerships and produce a shared analysis roadmap.
“Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence for Public Transportation Services”
This venture will develop a brand new AI strategy for transit planning that displays the priorities of group members and transit employees and higher aligns with native wants. By combining group engagement with machine studying, the group will check a mannequin that learns and incorporates human preferences into superior planning instruments.
“Leveraging AI to improve therapeutic outcomes in parent-focused psychotherapy”
This venture proposes creating a pure language system that gives dad and mom a safe, scalable manner to observe relationship-building and behavior-management abilities between remedy classes. The proposed system will present rapid, iterative suggestions to enhance ability uptake and handle a significant implementation hole in present remedy fashions.
“Leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance language learning by non-speaking children with disabilities who use speech generating technologies”
This venture goals to enhance speech-generating applied sciences so non-speaking youngsters with communication disabilities can higher develop language abilities. This pilot will create and consider little one and grownup language fashions tailor-made to youngsters’s language ranges and conversational contexts, and design prototype interfaces that present delicate, real-time scaffolding prompts to each youngsters and their communication companions.
“Transparent and Reproducible AI-assisted Annotation for Social Data: A Multi-Agent framework”
This venture will develop AI instruments to make large-scale evaluation of public officers’ communication extra clear and reproducible. To handle gradual, expensive annotation and inconsistent LLM outputs, the group will create a dual-agent annotator–inspector system and a human-in-the-loop framework for sooner, correct codebook refinement.