Last summer, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Provost Cynthia Barnhart SM ’85, PhD ’88, issued a call for papers to “articulate effective roadmaps, policy recommendations, and calls for action across the broad domain of generative AI.” The response to the call far exceeded expectations with 75 proposals submitted. Of those, 27 proposals were selected for seed funding.
In light of this enthusiastic response, Kornbluth and Barnhart announced a second call for proposals last fall.
“The groundswell of interest and the caliber of the ideas overall made clear that a second round was in order,” they said in their email to MIT’s research community this fall. This second call for proposals resulted in 53 submissions.
Following the second call, the faculty committee from the first round considered the proposals and selected 16 proposals to receive exploratory funding. Co-authored by interdisciplinary teams of faculty and researchers affiliated with all five of the Institute’s schools and the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, the proposals offer insights and perspectives on the potential impact and applications of generative AI across a broad range of topics and disciplines.
Each selected research group will receive between $50,000 and $70,000 to create 10-page impact papers. Those papers will be shared widely via a publication venue managed and hosted by The MIT Press under the auspices of the MIT Open Publishing Services program.
As with the first round of papers, Thomas Tull, a member of the MIT School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council and a former innovation scholar at the School of Engineering, contributed funding to support the effort.
The selected papers are:
This article was written by Mary Beth Gallagher of the School of Engineering and was originally published on MIT News on March 28, 2024.
