The Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech (IPaT) and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) co-sponsored more than $55,000 in seed grant awards to four research projects. These 2025-2026 IPaT/GTRI newly awarded grants provide seed funding for new research collaborations or provide support for new forms of internal and external research community engagement and collaboration.  
 
Congratulations to these four winning project teams:

1) Proposal title: Building a Research to Impact Collaborative on AI and Global Health

Research overview: Research and practice at the intersection of AI and global health has grown rapidly in the last few years, yet most of these efforts are fragmented and disconnected. There is a pressing need for spaces that facilitate knowledge-sharing and resource coordination in this space. We are thus launching a global, interdisciplinary Research to Impact Collaborative (RIC) on AI and global health that will: 1) support knowledge-sharing across research and practice, 2) facilitate student learning, and 3) accelerate cross-sector collaborations. To catalyze the RIC, we will conduct a year-long virtual seminar series and in-person workshops that will bring together researchers, practitioners, and students. This initiative will position Georgia Tech as a leader in AI and global health, build a lasting collaborative, and lay the foundation for interdisciplinary collaborations and future funding.

Team members: Naveena Karusala, Neha Kumar, and Munmun De Choudhury at the School of Interactive Computing; Kai Wang at the School of Computational Science and Engineering; Gari Clifford at the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Additional members: Azra Ismail (Emory University), Anupriya Tuli and Madeline Balaam (KTH), Pushpendra Singh (IIIT-Delhi), Melissa Densmore (University of Cape Town), Naomi Yamashita (Kyoto University), Neha Madhiwalla (ARMMAN), Shirley Yan and Anubhav Arora (Noora Health)

2) Proposal title: Project: Are Data Centers the New Landfills?

Research overview: Data centers are growing rapidly in the U.S., with nowhere more notable than in Georgia, particularly in the Atlanta metropolitan region (Berger, 2025). This expansion continues as policymakers and the data center industry position data centers as a source of innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), national security, and economic growth brought by the financial returns of data centers. Data center energy use has nearly tripled in the last decade to a total of 4.4% of electricity use in the US and may triple again over the next decade (Shehabi et al., 2024). This growth is driven by increasing demands for data-intensive technologies and applications, like AI, and a data center-friendly policy climate in Georgia (see Georgia HB1291). Like landfills, data centers are often sited in ways that impose local external costs, impacting important aspects of everyday life, such as water security, energy prices, taxes, jobs, housing, and air quality. In Georgia, a proposed data center consumes approximately 6 million gallons of water per day, a volume equivalent to filling nine Olympic-sized swimming pools (Mecke, 2025). Furthermore, the tax revenue that Georgia generates from data centers is estimated to be far less than the cost of incentives provided to the industry (e.g. subsidies for equipment), resulting in a negative state fiscal impact of $18 million in 2021 (Hardee et al., 2022). This proposed IPAT Research Grant investigates the trade-offs in constructing data centers, weighing the economic benefits against their external impacts on local Atlanta communities. In doing so, we aim to develop the next generation of responsible and ethical data centers that aim to inform and empower communities exposed to the externalities imposed by data centers. Scholars of data centers argue that community experiences of data centers rarely feature alongside the dominant promises of data centers such as economic growth and technological innovation (Zander 2024). Highlighting these alternative experiences, we will suggest policy and data tools to better site, deploy, and discuss how data centers are built, maintained, and shape the lives of their neighbors.

Team members:  Cindy Lin and Josiah Hester, School of Interactive Computing; Allen Hyde, School of History and Sociology; Joe Bozeman III, School of Civil Engineering; Elora Raymond, School of City and Regional Planning; Anthony Harding, School of Public Policy and Jung Ho Lewe, School of Aerospace Engineering.

3) Proposal title: The Sound of Motion: Transforming Artistic Body Movement into Music for Motor Therapy Investigators

Research overview: This research proposal aims to initiate a new collaborative project across the Colleges of Sciences, Computing, and Liberal Arts to start designing and developing a novel platform that enables augmented artistic expression exercise through body movements as instruments. When a person moves their trunk, legs, arms, or a handheld object (e.g., a Wizarding wand), the platform will transform their movement trajectories into the associated sounds of musical instruments (i.e., sonification). Turning the movement trajectories into sounds will enable people with motor disabilities (e.g., Parkinson’s disease; stroke) to express their artistry with their less-impaired body parts. Additionally, developing augmented artistic exercises as a new rehabilitation paradigm may stimulate previously untapped neuromotor strategies and facilitate motor recovery. Furthermore, the quality of artistic movement can be objectively assessed through this platform. Experts in human motor control (Shinohara), sonification and human-AI interaction (Walker), and human-computer interaction in the performing arts (Trajkova) will combine their complementary expertise to design and develop such a multimodal system, demonstrating proof of concept. This interdisciplinary R&D will benefit older adults and individuals with motor impairments by enhancing their well-being by introducing new, enjoyable, engaging, and rewarding artistic expressions or exercises. Such activities can enhance the release of neurotransmitters that facilitate neural plasticity (e.g., dopamine), ultimately leading to improved motor function.

Team members: Minoru Shinohara, College of Sciences; Bruce Walker, College of Computing; Milka Trajkova, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts; Joshua Posen, College of Engineering.

4) Proposal title: Generating Space-making Companion Robot Behaviors through Large Language Models (LLMs) for Morally Ambiguous Situations.

Research overview: Increasingly operating in public spaces and urban life, robots can be easily caught in such morally ambiguous situations, which are often dynamic, complex, and unpredictable, presenting novel factors and agencies that can quickly exceed the scope of any projected (or pre-programmed) human-robot interaction. LLMs are well-suited to interpreting specific scenarios and producing logically coherent responses, which makes them ideal for contexts where pre-programming robot behavior is impractical. In this project, we investigate whether and how LLMs can generate appropriate behaviors for a space-making robot reading companion in morally ambiguous situations.

Team members: Yixiao Wang, School of Industrial Design; Tyler Cook, Carter School of Public Policy; Shreyas C Kousik, School of Mechanical Engineering.