Data science seed fund spurs innovation, collaboration across campus, continents
November 11, 2024UNC Global Affairs
Carolina’s vice provost for global affairs and chief global officer, Barbara Stephenson welcomes conference participants. Photo submitted.
This fall, researchers, philosophers, lawyers and students from 21 institutions around the world convened at Carolina for a conference to discuss how to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to address critical issues in society. Participants presented on the uses of AI in detecting gaps in online news reporting, enhancing accessibility for the deaf community and guiding the development of new ethical and judicial standards among other topics.
Researchers from Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen’s International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW) organized the conference with funding from the Joint Seed Fund for Research and Emerging Technologies, a fund which Carolina and Tübingen, one of Carolina’s strategic partners, launched in 2022.
UNC-Chapel Hill — both UNC Global Affairs and UNC Research — and Tübingen contribute up to $10,000 equally for research projects in the fields of AI and data science and jointly select the projects. To date, eight projects have been funded. Because of this innovative approach to partnership, Carolina received the IIE Heiskell Award for Strategic Partnerships in April 2024.
The application deadline for the next round of funding is Friday, Nov. 15.
“The seed fund is critical to increasing cooperation among researchers,” said Laura Schelenz, former senior researcher at IZEW, who organized the conference with SILS’s Mohammad Jarrahi. “The seed fund is an excellent opportunity for collaboration and allows researchers to work on their passion projects and engage in new research topics.”
Harlin Lee, assistant professor in the UNC School of Data Science and Society, has used the seed fund to reignite her longtime interest in medical research. (In college, she earned degrees in computer science and engineering, after initially studying biology.) Through the seed fund, she studies privacy concerns in pediatric health data, and she hopes to create an AI model that will alert health care providers and patients to detrimental health conditions, like epilepsy and sleep apnea. She is partnering with researchers at Tübingen to build AI models that adhere to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, something, she believes, researchers increasingly need to consider. Moreover, Lee noted that collaborating with international colleagues, including students at Tübingen, has enabled her graduate student to gain a broader, comparative perspective.
UNC School of Education’s Jeffrey Greene, interim associate dean for research and faculty development, and Matt Bernacki, associate professor, are collaborating with Tübingen researchers on a project supported by the seed fund to leverage data to offer insights into student success. Both extolled the benefits they have seen from transatlantic engagement and research for their students. Greene and Bernacki said thinking globally allowed them to test their methods and models in different cultures, increasing the likelihood that these interventions will be beneficial for student learning.
“The cross-pollination has led to better training,” Bernacki said. “[It has been] a true learning opportunity for all of the students, with international scholars acting as role models, opening students’ minds to different ways of thinking about problems or opportunities.”
Other Carolina faculty members, like Courtney Rivard, report similarly transformative experiences from collaborations with Tübingen. Rivard, assistant professor in Carolina’s Department of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Digital Innovation Lab, is working with Tübingen colleagues on a project supported by the seed fund to explore the relationship between narrative and care. The group’s research has shown that patients with eating disorders gain greater insight into their conditions through narrative expression, while health care providers gain a better understanding of patient experiences. As a result, narrative expression empowers patients and providers alike to seek or provide better care. Rivard, who received a Faculty Award for Global Excellence from UNC Global Affairs in 2024, stated that conducting this research in a transatlantic forum is vital.
“The way a culture frames a disorder can determine how stigma is perpetuated and allows us to more fully understand how disorders can be treated,” she said.
She hopes to institutionalize and expand the partnership, inviting researchers from Tübingen to come to Chapel Hill to apply this approach to study effects of illnesses like chronic pain and long COVID.
Tori Smith Ekstrand, professor at UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and recipient of a 2023 Faculty Award for Global Excellence, also received support from the seed fund. Ekstrand has conducted projects on AI regulation and misinformation and has held workshops that bring together researchers from law, political science, history and communication. For Ekstrand, international collaboration is imperative to address the international threat posed by disinformation and the challenges around platform regulation and AI governance.
Several researchers who are engaged in the partnership acknowledged the opportunity the seed fund provides to apply novel solutions to complex problems. Tim Pawlowski, Tübingen’s chair of sport economics, sport management and media research, is working with scholars at UNC-Chapel Hill on sports science and health research.
“One of the most exciting things about the partnership is that even within the same discipline, we have people working on different things with completely different views,” Pawlowski said. “These people can explore new settings in their research and have their eyes opened by getting to know the other research that is going on.”
In the three years since the seed fund was started, it has generated dozens of workshops, conferences and meetings, bringing together Carolina students who have gained global education opportunities and researchers who have collaborated on creative solutions to address some of the most pressing challenges facing the world.
“The seed is an interesting metaphor,” Rivard said. “UNC Global Affairs has given me tools to grow as a scholar. We are lucky to have such a good match in Tübingen, too, where scholars are willing to think broadly and boldly. I feel really appreciative that there’s a capacious understanding of data and data science between our institutions, which has allowed for a unique type of exploration and broad understanding of data science through partnership.”
Those interested in learning more about the Joint Seed Fund for Research and Emerging Technologies may contact Carolina’s global partnerships team. The application deadline for this cycle is Friday, Nov. 15.