SOU Computer Scientist Awarded $250K Grant To Research Transfer Of AI Knowledge
ASHLAND, Ore. — An assistant professor in Southern Oregon University’s Computer Science Department, Bernadette Boscoe, has been awarded a $250,000 grant to research archived protocols and help keep track of tacit knowledge in different subjects at SOU, UCLA, and Cornell University. The grant would in turn benefit various academic disciplines.
SOU Computer Scientist Awarded Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant For AI Research
The South Oregon University (SOU) announced in a news release that Bernadette Boscoe has been awarded a $250,000 grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to fund her study of tacit knowledge in research settings.
This covers the unspoken practices of academic teams that sometimes get lost when a project ends or is disrupted and includes gathering, storing, and retrieving these practices.
As an institution dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge, the Sloan Foundation is a not-for-profit, mission-driven initiative established in 1934 by the then-president and chief executive officer of the General Motors Corporation, Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. Grants are awarded by the foundation for:
- Developing or leveraging technology to empower research
- Research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics through direct support.
- Enhancing and deepening public engagement with science and scientists.
- Increasing the quality, diversity, equity, and inclusiveness of scientific institutions and the science workforce.
Boscoe, a computer and information scientist, earned a Ph.D. in information science from UCLA after receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York, an associate degree in computer science from Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania, and a master’s degree in mathematics from California State University-Northridge.
She currently researches and builds infrastructures and tools to help domain scientists do their work.
SOU Assistant Professor To Research Tacit AI Knowledge
Boscoe said that much of the tacit, hands-on training practices are lost when students, postdoctoral students, researchers, or professors leave a project or lab because they are not documented.
With the rapid advances of LLMs in AI, there are more computational capabilities to keep track of tacit knowledge and query this knowledge in a natural language form now.
As researchers and professors onboard new members to their groups, and train them to do research, mentorships are the main training method that transfer knowledge within most academic research groups.
Boscoe said “AI can be used to have researchers rethink how they onboard newcomers, and consider how important tacit knowledge is in continuing collaborations and research over time,”
Using a Large Language Model (LLM) of artificial intelligence, Boscoe intends to archive the protocols of scientific groups researching environmental science at SOU, violin acoustics at Cornell University, and astronomy at UCLA.
An AI framework that pairs an LLM with an information retrieval system to improve the accuracy and relevance of resulting data, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), will be central to her research with SOU computer science graduate Chandler Campbell who will be building the RAG-LLM tool, called AquiLLM.
The grant will fund the development of AquiLLM (named after the constellation Aquila) tools to be used at SOU, Cornell, and UCLA to enable each research team to store and query its own tacit knowledge over time.
Funding will also be given to students at the three universities who are participating in the research projects.
Boscoe’s research will be funded over the next year by the Sloan Foundation grant as an extension of her previous work, with the addition of artificial intelligence frameworks.