IPaT Seed Funding Awarded to Four Projects

The Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech (IPaT), the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems co-sponsored $54,000 in seed grant awards to four research projects. The goal of the grants for 2024-25 is to promote research activities involving faculty and students from the many disciplines represented in IPaT. Engagement grants are also designed to foster new collaborations internal or external to Georgia Tech.

“Congratulations to this year’s four winning research teams,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “These projects explore sustainability, AI, education, artistic learning, and critical computing. They all advance IPaT’s goal to develop technologies that empower people from all walks of life.”

Congratulations to these winning project teams:

Proposal Title: Making Sustainability Data Public on the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge
Team Members: Yanni Loukissas, associate professor, School of Literature, Media and Communication; Emily Weigel, senior academic professional, School of Biological Sciences; Alison Valk, Jason Wright, and Charlie Bennett with the Georgia Tech Library; Steve Place, Jermaine Clonts, and Svetlana Sorok with the Georgia Tech Office of Sustainability.
Research Overview: Our research idea is to study the social effects of fostering creative, public experiences with real-time, sustainability-related data on campus with the long-term goal of learning what a resource-conscious campus community might look like. Our approach will be to develop an interactive data visualization prototype for the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge that will visualize real-time water use data in 47 student housing buildings. This visualization will serve as an adaptable research instrument through which to explore the potential for public experiences with data. It will challenge student residents to reflect on and take practical steps to change the environmental footprint of the places where they live. This research project is co-funded with Georgia Tech's Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

Proposal title: Computational Design AI System to Empower Maker Educators
Team members: HyunJoo Oh, assistant professor, School of Industrial Design and School of Interactive Computing; Sehoon Ha, assistant professor, School of Interactive Computing; Sabrina Grossman, program director, Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Georgia Tech. 
Research overview: The rise of design and fabrication tools like 3D printers and microcontrollers has expanded maker education from K-12 to higher education. However, access remains a challenge, especially for underprivileged youth. Teachers often struggle to lead maker-centered activities due to a lack of design and engineering expertise, which particularly affects students in low-resource districts where school activities may be their only exposure to creative learning. To address this, we propose developing a web-based AI system that empowers teachers to lead kinetic design and engineering projects. Through participatory design with experienced teachers, the system will assist with project design and offer customized instructional guidance by identifying challenging steps and potential recovery solutions and adapting content to meet teachers’ needs.

Proposal title: Democratizing Creative Agency Through Interactive Technologies and Music Education
Team members: Moeiini Reilly, research technologist, GTRI, and human-centered computing Ph.D. student with the School of Interactive Computing; Paul Brancato, research engineer, GTRI; Nicole Brancato, composer and music educator.
Research overview: Artistic computing learning environments play a crucial role in promoting equity and inclusion in computing by offering diverse opportunities to learn computational thinking through culturally relevant programming. Despite advances in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) education, there remains a significant gap in understanding how learners interact with and design creatively in these constructionist settings, as well as how the materiality of computational artifacts influences learning processes, meaning-making, and creative agency. This research seeks to build a framework for centering social and cultural dimensions of artistic learning within computational environments augmented by low-cost, technology-enhanced music education.

Proposal Title: Fostering the Landscape of “Critical Computing” at Georgia Tech
Team Members: Richmond Wong, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Heidi Biggs, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Carl DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing; Betsy DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing.
Research Overview: Critical computing interrogates the social values, normative orientations, and unintended consequences of computing applications, and it is quickly coming to occupy a central place in research and practice among Georgia Tech researchers and their larger research communities. We seek to build a transdisciplinary critical computing research community at Georgia Tech spanning computing, the social sciences, humanities, and related disciplines. Through a working group and symposium series, we will explore the methods, concepts, theories, history, funding, and evaluation of critical computing research. We will investigate approaches to critical computing research that foreground issues of social values and ethics, engage in just and equitable research approaches, explore new forms of communication and expression, and seek to pursue meaningful alternatives to the status quo.