After a successful call for proposals on AI studies in the summer, MIT issued a second call for papers that resulted in 53 submissions. Subsequently, 16 of these were selected to receive exploratory funding. The selected proposals offer insights and perspectives on the potential impact of AI across various domains.
The MIT President, Sally Kornbluth, and Provost Cynthia Barnhart were behind the initiative and were glad with the overwhelming response at both instances. Their latter call aimed to build on the momentum of the positive reaction to the prior call, and they conveyed this objective to the MIT research community via email.
The selected proposals are led by interdisciplinary teams composed of faculty and researchers from all five MIT schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. The goal is to explore the potential applications and impacts of generative AI in various fields and topics; these include privacy, human interaction, the creative economy, aging, and language, among others.
The selected research groups will receive funding ranging between $50,000 and $70,000, which they will use to create 10-page long impact papers. The publication of these papers will be managed and hosted by the MIT Open Publishing Services program under the MIT Press. The objective is to make these studies widely available to the public domain.
Thomas Tull, a member of the MIT School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council and a former innovation scholar at the Engineering School, financially aided this initiative, as he did with the first call. It is expected that the research papers from varied spheres of study will continue to reinforce the argument for the use of AI to transform, innovate and improve many facets of human life and interaction. Significant papers selected include those focusing on AI in cities, AI and its impact on the artistic world, and the relationship between AI and the science of language.
