Research Projects
AI and Africa
Creating AI-driven solutions that meet the real needs of African communities and contribute to sustainable development and improved quality of life. How can people in Africa create AIs by and for their own communities? What makes an AI culturally relevant, resource aware, and context specific? How do we tailor LLMs to specific African contexts and languages?
Low-Resource Language Technology
Many are welcoming and cheering for the recent advancement of language technology, such as the commercially available large language models (LLMs). As LLMs are trained on trillions of tokens from each language, how do we develop low-resource languages in this era, and how are users of low-resource languages affected?
Community Health and Digital Communications
Health equity within and across communities is shaped by numerous social factors. These social determinants of health are often echoed on and impacted by digital platforms. Effective public health responses must, therefore, consider a community’s digital ecosystem while developing equity-oriented sociotechnical systems and approaches. In this work, we have partnered with several community-based research coalitions to address issues of health equity that especially affect Black and Hispanic/Latinx communities in Georgia.
Digital Threats to Democracy
Enhancing civic engagement, strengthening democracy, and monitoring elections. What role does social media play in elections? How can we identify and respond to hate speech and disinformation designed to undermine democratic practice? Can we build systems that enhance transparency and good governance? How can ICTs help promote an innovative and effective civil society?
Open Innovation Platform
Open and sustainable innovation and social entrepreneurship with global connectivity. How do we design a globally connected makerspace that is open, accessible, and welcoming? How do we apply global manufacturing innovations and hardware prototyping efficiencies towards sustainable systems?
