By Laurel White
A School of Education faculty member has received an internationally competitive award from the Society for Learning Analytics Research that will support her research on bias in artificial intelligence tools.
Shamya Karumbaiah, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, received the organization’s annual ECR Research Grant. The honor recognizes a promising early career researcher in learning analytics and provides funding for research. It was awarded at the International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference, which was held in Dublin, Ireland, in March.
With the award, Karumbaiah will pursue a project that seeks to build a better understanding of how artificial intelligence tools called large language models (LLMs) may be biased. LLMs are trained on massive amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like text but, as Karumbaiah points out, they may not be aligned to the different ways children produce language as they learn a new topic.
Karumbaiah says she hopes the project will contribute to more responsible and trustworthy use of artificial intelligence tools in educational settings.
“I hope this work will help educators use AI tools in a way that is ethical and responsive to the needs of all students,” she says.
Karumbaiah recently received funding from the Spencer Foundation to take some of these ideas into Wisconsin classrooms. Last year, she also received funding for her work from the American Family Funding Initiative, a unique sponsored research partnership between American Family Insurance and UW–Madison through the Data Science Institute.
Her ongoing research includes collaborations with School of Education faculty and staff members Sadhana Puntambekar, Daniel Bolt, Mariana Castro, and Diego Román, as well as philosophy professor Harry Brighouse and political science professor Keisha Lindsay.