The Institute for AI launched its inaugural seed grant program with generous funds from the Provost's Office, a couple of months ago. The Institute held its seed grant competition in two rounds, during which it requested letters of intent in the first round, invited full proposals in the second round, and selected just a handful of these for funding. All full proposals were thoroughly assessed by reviewers from our interdisciplinary review committee. We sincerely thank the review committee for volunteering their time to help in our decision making. The following interdisciplinary full proposals were selected for seed grant awards: An Interdisciplinary Assessment of AI Cybersecurity Threats: Preparedness and Vulnerabilities in Georgia's County Governments:Awardees: Gregory Porumbescu (SPIA), Jason Anastasopoulous (SPIA), Elena Karahanna (MIS), Roberto Perdisci (Computing), Andrew Whitford (SPIA) Developing Multimodality Large Language Models for Telemedicine:Awardees: Tianming Liu (Computing), Juliet Sekandi (GHI-CPH), Eugene Douglass (Pharmacy) Combining AI tools with Biofeedback to Determine the Drivers of Interest and Curiosity during Science Learning:Awardees: Anna Abraham (Torrance), Xiaoming Zhai (CoEd) Advances in Multi-Modal and Explainable ML Methods for Predicting Protein Post-Translational Modifications:Awardees: Fei Dou (Computing), Natarajan Kannan (IOB), Gagan Agrawal (Computing), Ninghao Liu (Computing) Congratulations to the awardees, and many thanks to all the investigators who wrote letters of intent and full proposals in short periods of time. As IAI celebrates 40 years of AI accomplishments at UGA, faculty and students are encouraged to engage in the series of planned events celebrating this milestone. Thanks to the entire IAI community for driving innovation in AI!
