Think for Yourself in an Algorithm-Driven World (Twella)
Lead Faculty: James Damico
How does your feed influence what you believe? Twella helps learners build the self-awareness and critical reasoning to think for themselves in a world designed to think for them. Through real-world content, personalized feedback, skill-building activities, and engaging mini-games, students examine their assumptions, weigh evidence, and consider different perspectives. These capacities are essential for navigating the future of work and participating thoughtfully in civic life.
Immersive AI-Powered Virtual Classroom for Teacher Development Virtual Teaching Simulator (VTS)
Lead Faculty: Meredith Park Rogers, Adam Maltese, Dionne Cross Francis
Preparing educators for the complexities of modern classrooms requires opportunities for repeated practice, reflection, and feedback. This project develops an immersive virtual teaching environment where educators and teacher candidates can interact with AI-driven student avatars in realistic classroom scenarios. The platform enables users to rehearse instructional strategies, classroom management techniques, and equitable teaching practices while receiving actionable feedback. By combining artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and educational research, the project seeks to provide scalable, low-risk opportunities for professional growth and instructional improvement.
Adaptive Transcription for Underserved Speech Communities (Equason)
Lead Faculty: Erik Jacobson
Many automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems struggle to accurately understand speakers whose dialects, accents, languages, or communication patterns are underrepresented in existing datasets. This project develops specialized AI transcription models designed to improve accessibility and inclusion for underserved speech communities. By creating and refining adaptive ASR technologies, the research aims to increase transcription accuracy, expand access to digital communication tools, and ensure that emerging AI systems better represent the diversity of human speech.