NEWS: Olin Faculty Win $400K NSF Grant for AI Curriculum Development
Three Olin College professors have been awarded a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a curriculum in which engineering and computer science students use artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance employment opportunities for people who are blind or visually impaired and for older adults.
Pictured (L to R): Paul Ruvolo, professor of computer science, Caitrin Lynch, professor of anthropology, and Sam Michalka, associate professor of computational neuroscience and engineering.
The work is being spearheaded by Principal Investigator (PI) Paul Ruvolo, professor of computer science, and co-PIs Caitrin Lynch, professor of anthropology, and Sam Michalka, associate professor of computational neuroscience and engineering. This three-year project will engage Olin students to collaborate with faculty, community partners, and other stakeholders to co-create AI-powered systems that can realize improved employment outcomes for these two historically underemployed populations.
“We want students to be able to deeply integrate technical concepts like machine learning and AI while also understanding the social impact they can have with their work,” says Ruvolo. “Caitrin, Sam, and I have been working on these kinds of curricula together for years at Olin, with courses such as ‘Technology, Accessibility, and Design’ and 'Social Technology Enterprise with Purpose' being the result. This kind of deep engagement can shift students’ identities as engineers and their role in the world.”
Together, the three faculty want their curriculum to provide deeply experiential, hands-on learning opportunities while students learn foundational technical skills, all grounded within the social sciences.
“At Olin, our Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences [AHS] courses are not taught merely to create ‘well-rounded’ students; we frame them as essential to engineering,” says Lynch.
“We want students to come away from Olin understanding that there are different ways of seeing the world and that appreciating these standpoints and perspectives is essential to being a good engineer.”
In the first year of the project, students will collaborate with blind and visually impaired people in partnership with both the Carroll Center for the Blind and the Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Each of these organizations serve the blind community by providing training and other resources aimed toward independent living, job training, and job placement.
The second year, students will work with older adults through a partnership with the Massachusetts Association of Councils on Aging’s (MCOA) 50+ Job Seekers program, RetirementJobs.com, and the Age-Friendly Institute. Each of these organizations work with older adult job seekers.
“In this work, we want students to navigate the complexities of designing technology for real people,” says Michalka. “One way to do this is through direct interaction with people, but this can be very difficult to coordinate and scale. We want to explore if there are methods of getting students to experience some of the benefits of these interactions without the intensive time resources that are required for direct interaction. We hope this can supplement direct interactions and increase access to these types of experiences.”
By the third year, the team aims to have a replicable curriculum that they can share with other colleges and universities. “Based on other work done in this area, we know that this type of educational experience helps with retention, especially for students who come from backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented in engineering,” says Ruvolo.
“Olin feels like the kind of environment in which we can experiment with and develop this kind of curriculum, and then share what we learn with other, possibly larger, schools as a step to scale up these experiences for more impact.”
The project team includes Dr. Leah Horgan, a critical informatics scholar and instructor at Olin and Dr. Chelsea Andrews, research assistant professor at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) at Tufts University. Horgan will provide support related to the critical data studies components of the fieldwork experiences and projects as well as support during the creation of learning modules. Andrews will provide support for the qualitative research on student learning outcomes.
The grant is part of the NSF’s EducateAI Initiative, which was launched in 2023 with the goal of enabling educators to make high-quality AI educational experiences available nationwide to students from kindergarten through adulthood.
