From tracking the impact of artificial intelligence data centers to investigating how responsible AI technology could help support students in the classroom or alleviate homelessness, 11 new seed grants, including two in the College of Education, will fund projects by University of Maryland faculty who are advancing AI innovation in ways that uplift society.
The grants were selected through the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland's (AIM) 2026 Research Seed Award Program, which supports innovative science and scholarship advancing foundational AI research as well as AIM's core focus areas of accessibility, justice, sustainability and learning.
Together, the funded projects explore how emerging technologies can address complex societal challenges and generate meaningful public impact.
College of Education faculty are leading the following two projects:
From Singular Trajectories to Shared Insights: Individualized and Generalizable AI Models of Social and Agency Development in Autism
Led by Clark Leadership Chair Professor Fengfeng Ke in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership and Professor Yi Ting Huang of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, the project will develop a dual-scale, competency-based modeling framework to trace the development of social-communicative and relational agency capacities in autistic adolescents while integrating practitioner expertise within computational modeling workflows. In partnership with three autism-serving organizations, the team will develop and refine analytic tools that combine insights from behavior analysts, therapists and educators with data-driven modeling.
REPS-AI: Laying the Intellectual Foundations for Supporting All Students in Using GenAI Tools in Responsible, Effective, and Pedagogically Sound Ways in Computational Coursework
Associate Professor David Weintrop, who has a joint appointment in the College of Information and the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, is leading a project that seeks to identify the foundational concepts and practices that support undergraduate students in using generative AI tools responsibly, effectively and in pedagogically sound ways within computational coursework. The project will develop a taxonomy of productive GenAI concepts and practices that can serve as a foundation for courses, workshops and student support resources.
Illustration by Adobe Stock
This story is adapted from an article that first appeared in Maryland Today.
