Monica Lam, professor of computer science and director of the Open Virtual Assistant Lab at Stanford, is building a new entrant to the virtual assistant market, one that differs significantly from existing assistants in three ways.  First, it is based on new, cutting-edge voice recognition technology developed in Lam’s lab that is more flexible and adaptable than the technology used by Google and Amazon. Second, Lam’s technology is privacy-preserving, keeping consumer data safely and securely out of the hands of private actors.  Third, Lam’s technology sits atop a fully open network, allowing any vendor to develop apps for the platform.  This is in stark contrast with the closed networks operated by Apple and Google. Funds from this grant will allow Lam and her team to continue to develop their technology, making improvements to accuracy and speed, the detection and handling of errors, and the handling of unexpected inputs.  In addition, grant funds will enable Lam to pilot the technology’s first real world application for consumers. 

The California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE) is a network of faculty and administrators across doctoral-granting universities that aims to improve diversity in STEM graduate programs and the scientific workforce in California. This grant supports C-CIDE’s Julie Posselt who is seeking to expand the consortium’s efforts to the national level. Grant funds will allow Posselt to survey graduate schools across the country and facilitate partnership agreements with 10-15 universities and 3-5 STEM Ph.D. programs; engage in strategic planning with core staff, campus liaisons, steering committee members, and expert advisors to scale up C-CIDE to a national level; and test and refine new workshop content with its current partners.

This grant supports Luisa Buchman, Joey Shapiro Key, and Linda Simonsen at the University of Washington at Bothell (UWB), who are creating a bridge partnership with Heritage University (HU). The partnership between these two Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) seeks to provide a sustainable pathway to graduate education for Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o students, helping to dismantle systemic barriers that have led to persistent educational inequities. Grant funds provide paid summer research opportunities for eight HU students, paid research training for HU students prior to the summer research opportunities, place-based and Indigenous science workshops and activities, and guaranteed admission of HU students into bachelor’s and master’s programs at UWB.

One relatively niche but extremely important case of scientific collaboration is the “decadal survey”, the process by which some research disciplines reach consensus on field-level priorities for the next ten years. In disciplines where instruments and missions are highly capital-intensive, these decadal surveys play a critical role in guiding much spending and research funding across public and private sources. The decadal process generally plays out over several years through a series of local and then international convenings, and consensus is gradually reached through deliberative discussion, argument, coaxing, side conversations, and iterative production of documents until delivery of a final report. This grant supports Janet Vertesi and David Reinecke, two sociologists, who are studying how coronavirus-forced adoption of virtual meeting and collaboration technologies has affected the decadal survey processes of three fields: planetary science, heliophysics, and astrophysics. Using a combination of interviews, archival research, and ethnographic observation, Vertesi and Reinecke will document how pandemic-focused remote work changed the survey process in these three fields--what worked better and what worked worse—with an eye towards articulating how to improve online collaboration technologies in ways that increase the benefits and decrease the costs of using them for discipline-wide scientific collaboration.

This grant supports Michael Samuelian at Cornell University, who organized an Urban Tech Summit at the university’s Roosevelt Island campus in fall 2021. An initiative by SmartCities New York, the event aimed to support the development, adoption and evaluation of technologies that make cities more connected, livable, efficient, and accessible. Grant funds contributes to the overall expenses for running the event, where researchers, practitioners, advocates, and industry leaders in the urban tech space came together to present findings, network, identify common challenges, and forge new collaborations for future urban tech projects.