Six Multidisciplinary Projects Receive Seed Funding Grants

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The Institute for Community and Society Transformation has awarded $138,000 in funding to six project teams across various disciplines and departments. The funding covers a wide range of topics and prioritizes proposals that focus on the ICAST strategic areas of emphasis: Opportunity & Access, Technology & Society, and Native Nations Sovereignty and Cultures.

Enhancing Smoking Cessation through the X-Hale Breath Analyzer Integration with the Insight mHealth Mobile Intervention Platform

• Team: Binbin Weng, Michael Businelle
• Project Description: This project aims to advance smoking cessation for socioeconomically disadvantaged adults struggling with substance use disorders, particularly those facing challenges in quitting smoking. The team will do so by integrating the Xhale breath analyzer and the Insight mHealth platform. The goal of this project is to enhance the accuracy and efficacy of remote intervention.

Leveraging Large Language Models to Enhance Art Education

• Team: Robert Bailey, Peter Froslie, Ghulam Jilani Qadri
• Project Description: This project aims to develop an AI-powered system that supports inquiry-based learning during art museum visits and evaluates its acceptance by artists and museums as well as its impact on students’ learning outcomes.
  
  

Data-Informed Load Flexibility Management in Smart Building Systems

• Team: Qi Li & Li Song
• Project Description: This team proposed to address the problem of a failing grid infrastructure in the U.S. by enabling resilient operation of small-to-mid-sized buildings to provide grid services. This operation will be developed through a machine-learning driven predictive control framework, which integrates real-time data from sensors that monitor temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, motion, and plug load activity to model occupancy, thermal conditions, and device usage.

Bridging Edges: Reconnecting Maple Ridge and Gathering Place in Tulsa

• Team: Ronald Barnes, Francesco Cianfarani, Joseph Havlicek
• Project Description: The team members will perform a parking assessment to explore how spatial and social divides between the park and the adjacent historic neighborhood can be reimagined through community engagement and digital tools. The project aims to identify barriers and opportunities for parking, access and public life along the Gathering Place and the adjacent Maple Ridge neighborhood.

Investigations into the Correlates of Rural Violence in Oklahoma

• Team: Constance Chapple, Julie Gerlinger, Christina Miller
• Project Description: This proposal will explore the correlates of rural violence in Oklahoma by analyzing PolicyMap crime data to identify five rural/micropolitan violence hot spots over a five year span, analyze the data available in these five communities, construct a quantitative data set for these five rural hot spot communities containing information on violence rates, types of violence, victim-offender relationship, etc., and conduct preliminary bivariate rural/urban comparisons and multivariate models of the correlates of violence.

Center for the Ethics of Indigenous Genomic Research

• Team: Jessica Blanchard & Vanessa Hiratsuka
• Project Description: The CEIGR will use the ICAST funds to support the next iteration of partnership building and select research development activities, which will include convening this diverse team for training, research design, and preparation for proposal submission.