Innovation Grants
Each year, GVU provided grants to research initiatives committed to building on our success in interdisciplinary research and innovation in the human experience of computing. These investments create a path for external funding as our research prospers.
[scroll down for more information on previous years' grants]
2011 Research and Engagement Grants
New Media Nollywood
The Nigerian film industry, colloquially known as Nollywood, is the world’s most prolific movie maker. The industry produces 40 new movies a week, perhaps five times as many as come from Hollywood, creating one of Africa’s most significant and dynamic cultural export. New Media Nollywood week at Georgia Tech will offer a chance for the GVU community to engage with this vibrant visual media, and to help explore and invent it’s use of social, interactive and multimedia technologies. We will host more than 20 of Nollywood’s top media scholars, producers, directors and film stars. Their visit will be centered around a series of technology deep-dives, where we will collectively investigate new media technologies and the Nigerian film industry. The week will end with a one-day international workshop with the aim of crystallizing a shared vision for Nollywood and new digital technologies. Then stick around for the following week, when we plan to shoot an entire Nollywood style film on the Georgia Tech campus.
Team: Mike Best and Angela Dalle Vacche
Visual Analytics for Innovation Ecosystem Intelligence
Converging business ecosystems are become an increasing reatlity in many different domains - including mobile telecom, future media, biotechnology, healthcare and greentech/energy. The idea of having a "crystal ball" that provides capabilities to explore, make sense, and, perhaps, even provide actionable insight into rapidly changing business ecosystems is enormously attractive to many decision-makers, including technology executives, product strategists and investors. Business ecosystem intelligence includes an understanding of the competitive landscape, identification of innovation opportunities and strategic collaborations, and prediction of possible new product-market fit. We are exploring the design and development of a system that will take a variety of diverse data and document types and will provide the end-user with useful ecosystem intelligence. We take a visual analytics approach, combining computational analysis and text mining techniques with interactive visualizations, in order to create an environment that will allow an analyst to explore relevant information and gain a deeper understanding of converging ecosystem activities, evolution and opportunities.
Team: Rahul Basole and John Stasko
Driving Advances in Computing Education Through Application of Educational Psychology Principles
The aim of this project is to take advances in the learning sciences over the last couple of decades and apply them to computer science education. This is important because there has been an almost two-decade hiatus in systematic research on computer science education and a number of relevant findings can now be applied. For example, we know more about how students learn from examples, how to use multiple media to reduce cognitive load, and how to teach through student’s inquiry. This project will focus on creating examples of computer science instruction that are informed by modern learning sciences research. In so doing, we hope to create a kernel for growing a research program and providing a set of papers that connect the computing education research community to new ideas in education, psychology, and learning sciences. Our student audience will be in-service high school teachers who wish to become computer science teachers. New funding in NSF aims to train 8,000 new computer science teachers in the next four years. We will choose a computer science topic from those highlighted as critical in the new Computer Science: Principles advanced placement course under development. In this way, we choose a crucial audience and the most relevant content.
Team: Richard Catrambone and Mark Guzdial
Electronic Textiles Swatch Book (eSwatchBook) Workshops
The Electronic Textile Interface Swatch Book (ESwatchBook) Workshops will bring together professionals from both the design and computer science professions for a series of one-day creative endeavors in making wearable technologies. The ESwatchBook will be used in the inspiration and ideation phase of the design process to both foster ideas and act as bridge between disciplines. Observational and survey data will be taken from the workshops to look at the outcome of implementing the ESwatchBook in the design process. Georgia Tech researchers will lead these workshops at top design schools around the country, including Parsons and the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Team: Clint Zeagler and Thad Starner
