Last year, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Provost Cynthia Barnhart encouraged academics to submit papers outlining roadmaps, policy recommendations, and calls to action in the area of generative AI. This generated a strong response, with 75 submissions being made. 27 of these were selected to receive seed funding.
Due to the high interest and quality of ideas, a second call for submissions was made the following fall, yielding 53 applications. Reviewing the new proposals, a faculty committee selected 16 for exploratory funding. These were penned by interdisciplinary teams affiliated with all five of MIT’s schools and the Schwarzman College of Computing. The papers cover a variety of topics and disciplines and offer insights on the impact and applications of generative AI.
Each research team that had their paper selected will receive funding between $50,000 and $70,000 to create a 10-page impact paper. These papers will be shared through a publication hosted by the MIT Press under the MIT Open Publishing Services program. Thomas Tull, a member of the MIT School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council and a former innovation scholar, contributed funding toward the initiative.
The selected papers range in topic from the implementation of generative AI in privacy, physical sciences, visual intelligence, and art, to practical applications such as human interactions and negotiations, civic engagement, textile engineering, and drug discovery. Further topics include generative AI’s impact on the creative economy, live music performances, and language. Studies on robust and reliable generative AI systems, the aging population, and visual artists complete the list.
