Kicking off a new decade of startup production at Georgia Tech, CREATE-X hosted its 11th Demo Day, showcasing 100 startups created by Georgia Tech students, faculty, researchers, and alumni over 12 weeks this summer. More than 1,500 attendees, including Georgia government and business leaders, viewed new solutions ranging from fashion to healthcare in a bustling Exhibition Hall on Aug. 29.

The event traditionally begins shortly after the semester starts, giving the entrepreneurially curious a preview of what’s to come if they join the program’s accelerator during the next application cycle.

Demo Day is the culmination of the 12-week summer accelerator, Startup Launch, where founders receive mentorship, $5,000 in optional funding, and $150,000 in services to help build their businesses. Teams can be interdisciplinary, made up of co-founders even outside of Georgia Tech, and solopreneurs, ready to solve real-world problems.

Each year, Startup Launch has grown, from an initial cohort of eight startups to over 100 this year. The Office of Commercialization, the home of CREATE-X, plans to keep expanding opportunities for the Georgia Tech community to grow their entrepreneurial skills.

Counting courses, events, programming, and partnerships, CREATE-X has had more than 32,000 participants. The ultimate goal and mission of the program is to instill entrepreneurial confidence in all Tech students. Rahul Saxena, director of the program, spoke about how far the Institute has come in the last decade. 

“I’ve been plugged into Georgia Tech for over 10 years. In the past, when you said Georgia Tech and entrepreneurship in the same sentence, they’d laugh, believe it or not,” he said. “Fast-forward, we’re one of the top entrepreneurial schools in the country. Our first four cohorts value over $100 million, with one of them being a unicorn, and our last four cohorts are well on their way. We want our students to have as many shots at gold as possible before they graduate. And even if they decide on a traditional career pathway, we believe they’ll be ahead with this entrepreneurial mindset, which is something lacking in corporate.”

This year, CREATE-X reached over 560 startup teams launched. Founders represented 38 academic majors, and their total startup portfolio valuation exceeds $2 billion. 

CREATE-X opened its Startup Launch application for its next cohort on Aug. 30. For those interested, the priority deadline is Nov. 17. Early applicants have a higher chance at acceptance and the opportunity for more feedback. So, send in your applications to Startup Launch and become the next founder at Georgia Tech.

Missed out on Demo Day? Check out the CREATE-X Flickr page to see photos from the event and the Demo Day page to see other teams. For more opportunities to engage, visit the CREATE-X Engage page for upcoming events. 

Spotlight on Startups

Some of the standout startups from this year’s Demo Day include:

The Cloud Hub, a key initiative of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) at Georgia Tech, recently concluded a successful Call for Proposals focused on advancing the field of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). This initiative, made possible by a generous gift funding from Microsoft, aims to push the boundaries of GenAI research by supporting projects that explore both foundational aspects and innovative applications of this cutting-edge technology.

Call for Proposals: A Gateway to Innovation

Launched in early 2024, the Call for Proposals invited researchers from across Georgia Tech to submit their innovative ideas on GenAI. The scope was broad, encouraging proposals that spanned foundational research, system advancements, and novel applications in various disciplines, including arts, sciences, business, and engineering. A special emphasis was placed on projects that addressed responsible and ethical AI use.

The response from the Georgia Tech research community was overwhelming, with 76 proposals submitted by teams eager to explore this transformative technology. After a rigorous selection process, eight projects were selected for support. Each awarded team will also benefit from access to Microsoft’s Azure cloud resources..

Recognizing Microsoft’s Generous Contribution

This successful initiative was made possible through the generous support of Microsoft, whose contribution of research resources has empowered Georgia Tech researchers to explore new frontiers in GenAI. By providing access to Azure’s advanced tools and services, Microsoft has played a pivotal role in accelerating GenAI research at Georgia Tech, enabling researchers to tackle some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities in this rapidly evolving field.

Looking Ahead: Pioneering the Future of GenAI

The awarded projects, set to commence in Fall 2024, represent a diverse array of research directions, from improving the capabilities of large language models to innovative applications in data management and interdisciplinary collaborations. These projects are expected to make significant contributions to the body of knowledge in GenAI and are poised to have a lasting impact on the industry and beyond.

IDEaS and the Cloud Hub are committed to supporting these teams as they embark on their research journeys. The outcomes of these projects will be shared through publications and highlighted on the Cloud Hub web portal, ensuring visibility for the groundbreaking work enabled by this initiative.

Congratulations to the Fall 2024 Winners

• Annalisa Bracco | EAS "Modeling the Dispersal and Connectivity of Marine Larvae with GenAI Agents" [proposal co-funded with support from the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems]
• Yunan Luo | CSE “Designing New and Diverse Proteins with Generative AI”
• Kartik Goyal | IC “Generative AI for Greco-Roman Architectural Reconstruction: From Partial Unstructured Archaeological Descriptions to Structured Architectural Plans”
• Victor Fung | CSE “Intelligent LLM Agents for Materials Design and Automated Experimentation”
• Noura Howell | LMC “Applying Generative AI for STEM Education: Supporting AI literacy and community engagement with marginalized youth”
• Neha Kumar | IC “Towards Responsible Integration of Generative AI in Creative Game Development”
• Maureen Linden | Design “Best Practices in Generative AI Used in the Creation of Accessible Alternative Formats for People with Disabilities”
• Surya Kalidindi | ME & MSE “Accelerating Materials Development Through Generative AI Based Dimensionality Expansion Techniques”
• Tuo Zhao | ISyE “Adaptive and Robust Alignment of LLMs with Complex Rewards”

- Written by Benjamin Wright -

As Georgia Tech establishes itself as a national leader in AI research and education, some researchers on campus are putting AI to work to help meet sustainability goals in a range of areas including climate change adaptation and mitigation, urban farming, food distribution, and life cycle assessments while also focusing on ways to make sure AI is used ethically.

Josiah Hester, interim associate director for Community-Engaged Research in the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) and associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, sees these projects as wins from both a research standpoint and for the local, national, and global communities they could affect.

“These faculty exemplify Georgia Tech's commitment to serving and partnering with communities in our research,” he says. “Sustainability is one of the most pressing issues of our time. AI gives us new tools to build more resilient communities, but the complexities and nuances in applying this emerging suite of technologies can only be solved by community members and researchers working closely together to bridge the gap. This approach to AI for sustainability strengthens the bonds between our university and our communities and makes lasting impacts due to community buy-in.”

Flood Monitoring and Carbon Storage

Peng Chen, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering in the College of Computing, focuses on computational mathematics, data science, scientific machine learning, and parallel computing. Chen is combining these areas of expertise to develop algorithms to assist in practical applications such as flood monitoring and carbon dioxide capture and storage.

He is currently working on a National Science Foundation (NSF) project with colleagues in Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning and from the University of South Florida to develop flood models in the St. Petersburg, Florida area. As a low-lying state with more than 8,400 miles of coastline, Florida is one of the states most at risk from sea level rise and flooding caused by extreme weather events sparked by climate change.

Chen’s novel approach to flood monitoring takes existing high-resolution hydrological and hydrographical mapping and uses machine learning to incorporate real-time updates from social media users and existing traffic cameras to run rapid, low-cost simulations using deep neural networks. Current flood monitoring software is resource and time-intensive. Chen’s goal is to produce live modeling that can be used to warn residents and allocate emergency response resources as conditions change. That information would be available to the general public through a portal his team is working on.

“This project focuses on one particular community in Florida,” Chen says, “but we hope this methodology will be transferable to other locations and situations affected by climate change.”

In addition to the flood-monitoring project in Florida, Chen and his colleagues are developing new methods to improve the reliability and cost-effectiveness of storing carbon dioxide in underground rock formations. The process is plagued with uncertainty about the porosity of the bedrock, the optimal distribution of monitoring wells, and the rate at which carbon dioxide can be injected without over-pressurizing the bedrock, leading to collapse. The new simulations are fast, inexpensive, and minimize the risk of failure, which also decreases the cost of construction.

“Traditional high-fidelity simulation using supercomputers takes hours and lots of resources,” says Chen. “Now we can run these simulations in under one minute using AI models without sacrificing accuracy. Even when you factor in AI training costs, this is a huge savings in time and financial resources.”

Flood monitoring and carbon capture are passion projects for Chen, who sees an opportunity to use artificial intelligence to increase the pace and decrease the cost of problem-solving.

“I’m very excited about the possibility of solving grand challenges in the sustainability area with AI and machine learning models,” he says. “Engineering problems are full of uncertainty, but by using this technology, we can characterize the uncertainty in new ways and propagate it throughout our predictions to optimize designs and maximize performance.”

Urban Farming and Optimization

Yongsheng Chen works at the intersection of food, energy, and water. As the Bonnie W. and Charles W. Moorman Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Nutrients, Energy, and Water Center for Agriculture Technology, Chen is focused on making urban agriculture technologically feasible, financially viable, and, most importantly, sustainable. To do that he’s leveraging AI to speed up the design process and optimize farming and harvesting operations.

Chen’s closed-loop hydroponic system uses anaerobically treated wastewater for fertilization and irrigation by extracting and repurposing nutrients as fertilizer before filtering the water through polymeric membranes with nano-scale pores. Advancing filtration and purification processes depends on finding the right membrane materials to selectively separate contaminants, including antibiotics and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Chen and his team are using AI and machine learning to guide membrane material selection and fabrication to make contaminant separation as efficient as possible. Similarly, AI and machine learning are assisting in developing carbon capture materials such as ionic liquids that can retain carbon dioxide generated during wastewater treatment and redirect it to hydroponics systems, boosting food productivity.

“A fundamental angle of our research is that we do not see municipal wastewater as waste,” explains Chen. “It is a resource we can treat and recover components from to supply irrigation, fertilizer, and biogas, all while reducing the amount of energy used in conventional wastewater treatment methods.”

In addition to aiding in materials development, which reduces design time and production costs, Chen is using machine learning to optimize the growing cycle of produce, maximizing nutritional value. His USDA-funded vertical farm uses autonomous robots to measure critical cultivation parameters and take pictures without destroying plants. This data helps determine optimum environmental conditions, fertilizer supply, and harvest timing, resulting in a faster-growing, optimally nutritious plant with less fertilizer waste and lower emissions.

Chen’s work has received considerable federal funding. As the Urban Resilience and Sustainability Thrust Leader within the NSF-funded AI Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT), he has received additional funding to foster international collaboration in digital agriculture with colleagues across the United States and in Japan, Australia, and India.

Optimizing Food Distribution

At the other end of the agricultural spectrum is postdoc Rosemarie Santa González in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, who is conducting her research under the supervision of Professor Chelsea White and Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck, the director of Georgia Tech’s AI Hub as well as the director of AI4OPT.

Santa González is working with the Wisconsin Food Hub Cooperative to help traditional farmers get their products into the hands of consumers as efficiently as possible to reduce hunger and food waste. Preventing food waste is a priority for both the EPA and USDA. Current estimates are that 30 to 40% of the food produced in the United States ends up in landfills, which is a waste of resources on both the production end in the form of land, water, and chemical use, as well as a waste of resources when it comes to disposing of it, not to mention the impact of the greenhouses gases when wasted food decays.

To tackle this problem, Santa González and the Wisconsin Food Hub are helping small-scale farmers access refrigeration facilities and distribution chains. As part of her research, she is helping to develop AI tools that can optimize the logistics of the small-scale farmer supply chain while also making local consumers in underserved areas aware of what’s available so food doesn’t end up in landfills.

“This solution has to be accessible,” she says. “Not just in the sense that the food is accessible, but that the tools we are providing to them are accessible. The end users have to understand the tools and be able to use them. It has to be sustainable as a resource.”

Making AI accessible to people in the community is a core goal of the NSF’s AI Institute for Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure with Computational Learning in the Environment (ICICLE), one of the partners involved with the project.

“A large segment of the population we are working with, which includes historically marginalized communities, has a negative reaction to AI. They think of machines taking over, or data being stolen. Our goal is to democratize AI in these decision-support tools as we work toward the UN Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger. There is so much power in these tools to solve complex problems that have very real results. More people will be fed and less food will spoil before it gets to people’s homes.”

Santa González hopes the tools they are building can be packaged and customized for food co-ops everywhere.

AI and Ethics

Like Santa González, Joe Bozeman III is also focused on the ethical and sustainable deployment of AI and machine learning, especially among marginalized communities. The assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering is an industrial ecologist committed to fostering ethical climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. His SEEEL Lab works to make sure researchers understand the consequences of decisions before they move from academic concepts to policy decisions, particularly those that rely on data sets involving people and communities.

“With the administration of big data, there is a human tendency to assume that more data means everything is being captured, but that's not necessarily true,” he cautions. “More data could mean we're just capturing more of the data that already exists, while new research shows that we’re not including information from marginalized communities that have historically not been brought into the decision-making process. That includes underrepresented minorities, rural populations, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent people who may not interface with data collection tools.”

Bozeman is concerned that overlooking marginalized communities in data sets will result in decisions that at best ignore them and at worst cause them direct harm.

“Our lab doesn't wait for the negative harms to occur before we start talking about them,” explains Bozeman, who holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Public Policy. “Our lab forecasts what those harms will be so decision-makers and engineers can develop technologies that consider these things.”

He focuses on urbanization, the food-energy-water nexus, and the circular economy. He has found that much of the research in those areas is conducted in a vacuum without consideration for human engagement and the impact it could have when implemented.

Bozeman is lobbying for built-in tools and safeguards to mitigate the potential for harm from researchers using AI without appropriate consideration. He already sees a disconnect between the academic world and the public. Bridging that trust gap will require ethical uses of AI.

“We have to start rigorously including their voices in our decision-making to begin gaining trust with the public again. And with that trust, we can all start moving toward sustainable development. If we don't do that, I don't care how good our engineering solutions are, we're going to miss the boat entirely on bringing along the majority of the population.”

BBISS Support

Moving forward, Hester is excited about the impact the Brooks Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems can have on AI and sustainability research through a variety of support mechanisms.

“BBISS continues to invest in faculty development and training in community-driven research strategies, including the Community Engagement Faculty Fellows Program (with the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education), while empowering multidisciplinary teams to work together to solve grand engineering challenges with AI by supporting the AI+Climate Faculty Interest Group, as well as partnering with and providing administrative support for community-driven research projects.”

For three days, a cybercriminal unleashed a crippling ransomware attack on the futuristic city of Northbridge. The attack shut down the city’s infrastructure and severely impacted public services, until Georgia Tech cybersecurity experts stepped in to stop it. 

This scenario played out this weekend at the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) semi-final competition held at DEF CON 32 in Las Vegas. Team Atlanta, which included the Georgia Tech experts, were among the contest’s winners.  

Team Atlanta will now compete against six other teams in the final round that takes place at DEF CON 33 in August 2025. The finalists will keep their AI system and improve it over the next 12 months using the $2 million semi-final prize.

The AI systems in the finals must be open sourced and ready for immediate, real-world launch. The AIxCC final competition will award a $4 million grand prize to the ultimate champion.

Team Atlanta is made up of past and present Georgia Tech students and was put together with the help of SCP Professor Taesoo Kim. Not only did the team secure a spot in the final competition, they found a zero-day vulnerability in the contest. 

“I am incredibly proud to announce that Team Atlanta has qualified for the finals in the DARPA AIxCC competition,” said Taesoo Kim, professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and a vice president of Samsung Research. 

“This achievement is the result of exceptional collaboration across various organizations, including the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), industry partners like Samsung, and international academic institutions such as KAIST and POSTECH.” 

After noticing discrepancies in the competition score board, the team discovered and reported a bug in the competition itself. The type of vulnerability they discovered is known as a zero-day vulnerability, because vendors have zero days to fix the issue. 

While this didn’t earn Team Atlanta additional points, the competition organizer acknowledged the team and their finding during the closing ceremony. 

“Our team, deeply rooted in Atlanta and largely composed of Georgia Tech alumni, embodies the innovative spirit and community values that define our city,” said Kim. 

“With over 30 dedicated students and researchers, we have demonstrated the power of cross-disciplinary teamwork in the semi-final event. As we advance to the finals, we are committed to pushing the boundaries of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, and I firmly believe the resulting systems from this competition will transform the security landscape in the coming year!”

The team tested their cyber reasoning system (CRS), dubbed Atlantis, on software used for data management, website support, healthcare systems, supply chains, electrical grids, transportation, and other critical infrastructures.

Atlantis is a next-generation, bug-finding and fixing system that can hunt bugs in multiple coding languages. The system immediately issues accurate software patches without any human intervention. 

AIxCC is a Pentagon-backed initiative that was announced in August 2023 and will award up to $20 million in prize money throughout the competition. Team Atlanta was among the 42 teams that qualified for the semi-final competition earlier this year. 

A research group is calling for internet and social media moderators to strengthen their detection and intervention protocols for violent speech. 

Their study of language detection software found that algorithms struggle to differentiate anti-Asian violence-provoking speech from general hate speech. Left unchecked, threats of violence online can go unnoticed and turn into real-world attacks. 

Researchers from Georgia Tech and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) teamed together in the study. They made their discovery while testing natural language processing (NLP) models trained on data they crowdsourced from Asian communities. 

“The Covid-19 pandemic brought attention to how dangerous violence-provoking speech can be. There was a clear increase in reports of anti-Asian violence and hate crimes,” said Gaurav Verma, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate who led the study. 

“Such speech is often amplified on social platforms, which in turn fuels anti-Asian sentiments and attacks.”

Violence-provoking speech differs from more commonly studied forms of harmful speech, like hate speech. While hate speech denigrates or insults a group, violence-provoking speech implicitly or explicitly encourages violence against targeted communities.

Humans can define and characterize violent speech as a subset of hateful speech. However, computer models struggle to tell the difference due to subtle cues and implications in language.

The researchers tested five different NLP classifiers and analyzed their F1 score, which measures a model's performance. The classifiers reported a 0.89 score for detecting hate speech, while detecting violence-provoking speech was only 0.69. This contrast highlights the notable gap between these tools and their accuracy and reliability. 

The study stresses the importance of developing more refined methods for detecting violence-provoking speech. Internet misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric escalate tensions that lead to real-world violence. 

The Covid-19 pandemic exemplified how public health crises intensify this behavior, helping inspire the study. The group cited that anti-Asian crime across the U.S. increased by 339% in 2021 due to malicious content blaming Asians for the virus. 

The researchers believe their findings show the effectiveness of community-centric approaches to problems dealing with harmful speech. These approaches would enable informed decision-making between policymakers, targeted communities, and developers of online platforms.

Along with stronger models for detecting violence-provoking speech, the group discusses a direct solution: a tiered penalty system on online platforms. Tiered systems align penalties with severity of offenses, acting as both deterrent and intervention to different levels of harmful speech. 

“We believe that we cannot tackle a problem that affects a community without involving people who are directly impacted,” said Jiawei Zhou, a Ph.D. student who studies human-centered computing at Georgia Tech. 

“By collaborating with experts and community members, we ensure our research builds on front-line efforts to combat violence-provoking speech while remaining rooted in real experiences and needs of the targeted community.”

The researchers trained their tested NLP classifiers on a dataset crowdsourced from a survey of 120 participants who self-identified as Asian community members. In the survey, the participants labeled 1,000 posts from X (formerly Twitter) as containing either violence-provoking speech, hateful speech, or neither.

Since characterizing violence-provoking speech is not universal, the researchers created a specialized codebook for survey participants. The participants studied the codebook before their survey and used an abridged version while labeling. 

To create the codebook, the group used an initial set of anti-Asian keywords to scan posts on X from January 2020 to February 2023. This tactic yielded 420,000 posts containing harmful, anti-Asian language. 

The researchers then filtered the batch through new keywords and phrases. This refined the sample to 4,000 posts that potentially contained violence-provoking content. Keywords and phrases were added to the codebook while the filtered posts were used in the labeling survey.

The team used discussion and pilot testing to validate its codebook. During trial testing, pilots labeled 100 Twitter posts to ensure the sound design of the Asian community survey. The group also sent the codebook to the ADL for review and incorporated the organization’s feedback. 

“One of the major challenges in studying violence-provoking content online is effective data collection and funneling down because most platforms actively moderate and remove overtly hateful and violent material,” said Tech alumnus Rynaa Grover (M.S. CS 2024).

“To address the complexities of this data, we developed an innovative pipeline that deals with the scale of this data in a community-aware manner.”

Emphasis on community input extended into collaboration within Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. Faculty members Srijan Kumar and Munmun De Choudhury oversaw the research that their students spearheaded.

Kumar, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, advises Verma and Grover. His expertise is in artificial intelligence, data mining, and online safety.

De Choudhury is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing and advises Zhou. Their research connects societal mental health and social media interactions.

The Georgia Tech researchers partnered with the ADL, a leading non-governmental organization that combats real-world hate and extremism. ADL researchers Binny Mathew and Jordan Kraemer co-authored the paper.

The group will present its paper at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), which takes place in Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 11-16 

ACL 2024 accepted 40 papers written by Georgia Tech researchers. Of the 12 Georgia Tech faculty who authored papers accepted at the conference, nine are from the College of Computing, including Kumar and De Choudhury.

“It is great to see that the peers and research community recognize the importance of community-centric work that provides grounded insights about the capabilities of leading language models,” Verma said. 

“We hope the platform encourages more work that presents community-centered perspectives on important societal problems.” 

Visit https://sites.gatech.edu/research/acl-2024/ for news and coverage of Georgia Tech research presented at ACL 2024.

CREATE-X is built to help students integrate entrepreneurship into their academic journey through courses, workshops, and a startup accelerator. This spring, a new set of students displayed their solutions to real-world problems at the I2P Showcase. It’s our privilege to shine a light on and celebrate those journeys. Today’s spotlight focuses on the spring I2P Showcase third-place winners. 

Electrosuit 

Aubrey Hall, a first-year biomedical student, and Sherya Chakraborty, a first-year computer science major, founded a startup to produce a garment that eases the use of at-home, prescribed electrical stimulation for people with chronic pain, stroke, and motor impairments.

What made you interested in building this solution?

“I did research at Northwestern for a couple of years before this, and some of the patients I worked with had severe stroke and spasticity in their arms,” Chakraborty said. “I found out that when they tried using at-home prescribed electrical stimulation, they had trouble setting it off themselves. So, we created a garment to ease pressure on that.”

What part of the course was most helpful to you?

“One of our mentors, Sun Mi Park, was the first person to patent printable wires on fabric, and that gave us some inspiration to make our garment even more compact, easier to use, and integrate some interesting ideas that we wouldn’t have been able to without our mentors. So, our mentors are honestly the best part of the program,” Chakraborty said.

“For me, you don’t get a lot of chances to apply these engineering courses outside of the classroom,” said Hall. “This course is a really interesting way to get firsthand experience building a prototype and really understand the engineering process.”

What’s so special about CREATE-X?

“I think these student projects are the future, and a lot of these projects make it out of college and become actual companies. Giving students that possibility to make a change just from a simple idea and fueling that with funding so we don’t have to take risks out of our own pockets is a, really big deal,” Chakraborty said.

“It’s helpful to have that safety net, knowing that you have your mentors to back you, and also the people of the program to back you. It brings a lot of security and opportunity to try different things out and not have to be so fearful of failure. Even if you fail a million times, you can get back up and try again,” Hall said.

What’s the best insight you’ve gained from doing this?

“I think one big misconception is that entrepreneurship has a lot to do with finance and business and just lucrative ideas, but it’s pretty important to understand that you can solve a seemingly everyday problem,” said Chakraborty. “If it affects you or your friends, it’s still worth trying to find a way to solve it, especially backed up with money and mentors from CREATE-X. What’s the harm in trying something out?” 

“Don’t try to make it feel like it’s an all-or-nothing project,” Hall said. “You’re allowed to live your life as a college student but also pursue these interesting ideas and figure out if you enjoy entrepreneurship. It shouldn’t be this daunting task where if you don’t put everything in, you’re going to fail.”

“It’s also important to keep an open mind. We might come in with an idea and a very specific way of executing that idea, but we found out through talking with mentors, and with other students and people who gave us advice, that sometimes the idea you come in with is not going to be the same thing you end up with,” Chakraborty said. 

Next Steps

“We’ve only done four or five prototypes so far,” she noted. “We want to do at least 12 of those prototypes and keep working with our mentors, keep making connections at Emory, and just constantly getting more and more feedback about our prototypes until we get to a state where we’re satisfied, and we can demo our product and work with physical therapists across Atlanta.”

If you’re a student interested in building your own product for college credit, apply for I2P. And join us for Demo Day, Aug. 29, at 5 p.m., in the Georgia Tech Exhibition Hall to see new CREATE-X founders launch products in a variety of industries. Tickets are free but limited. Register today to secure your spot.

During the school year and the summer, Georgia Tech students can incorporate entrepreneurship into their college experience through courses, workshops, special events, and even a startup accelerator. CREATE-X invites you to delve into the journeys of our top achievers, this time focusing on the Spring 2024 I2P Showcase first-place winners: 

Dolfin Solutions

Marianna Cao, James Gao, and Jaeheon Shim, first-year computer science majors, are the founders of Dolfin Solutions, a personal financial management platform that promises a unified solution to budgeting, transaction management, and expense tracking, among other personal finance tasks. 

What challenges did you have in I2P, and how did you work through them?

 “We were really lucky to get an excellent mentor, Aaron Hillegass. He has a lot of experience in the industry as a startup founder himself, and he gave us a lot of help, both technical as well as business, throughout the process. That helped us make better decisions,” Gao said.

“I think the biggest challenge was, I had done projects in the past by myself, writing the full stack, but working together, communicating the requirements, and integrating everyone's different code at the end was a little bit of a logistical struggle,” Shim said. “But we managed to figure it out.”

What advice do you have for students interested in I2P or entrepreneurship in general?

“Go for it. It's a three-credit course, so it counts toward your junior capstone as well. You get $500. Now is the perfect time to start because you don't have much to lose. If you're doing I2P and your company fails, you still have four years of college; you can still pursue a traditional path. It's a little risk but a lot to gain,” Shim said.

“Even if you pivot or change your idea, it's important to believe in what you started,” said Cao. “If you don't believe in your app, then nobody else does. Right now, you have all of the friends, mentors, professors, and the right resources, and money is not an issue. It's a good opportunity for you to work on it on the side, and maybe it could turn into something.”

What’s Next?

“We’re going to build for the iOS and Android platforms, and then we're going to deploy hopefully by the end of summer,” Shim said. 

If you’re a student interested in building your own product for college credit, apply for I2P. And join us for Demo Day, Aug. 29, at 5 p.m., in the Georgia Tech Exhibition Hall to see new CREATE-X founders launch products in a variety of industries. Tickets are free but limited. Register today to secure your spot.

Researchers at Georgia Tech are creating accessible museum exhibits that explain artificial intelligence (AI) to middle school students, including the LuminAI interactive AI-based dance partner developed by Regents' Professor Brian Magerko.

Ph.D. students Yasmine Belghith and Atefeh Mahdavi co-led a study in a museum setting that observed how middle schoolers interact with the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. 

“It’s important for museums, especially science museums, to start incorporating these kinds of exhibits about AI and about using AI so the general population can have that avenue to interact with it and transfer that knowledge to everyday tools,” Belghith said.

Belghith and Mahdavi conducted their study with nine focus groups of 24 students at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. The team used the findings to inform their design of AI exhibits that the museum could display as early as 2025. 

Belghith is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing. Her advisor is Assistant Professor Jessica Roberts in the School of Interactive Computing. Magerko advises Mahdavi, a Ph.D. student in digital media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.

Belghith and Mahdavi presented a paper about their study in May at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2024 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Their work is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant dedicated to fostering AI literacy among middle schoolers in informal environments.

Expanding Accessibility

While there are existing efforts to reach students in the classroom, the researchers believe AI education is most accessible in informal learning environments like museums.

“There’s a need today for everybody to have some sort of AI literacy,” Belghith said. “Many middle schoolers will not be taking computer science courses or pursuing computer science careers, so there needs to be interventions to teach them what they should know about AI.”

The researchers found that most of the middle schoolers interacted with ChatGPT to either test its knowledge by prompting it to answer questions or socialize with it by having human-like conversations. 

Others fit the mold of “content explorers.” They did not engage with the AI aspect of ChatGPT and focused more on the content it produced.

Mahdavi said regardless of their approach, students would get “tunnel vision” in their interactions instead of exploring more of the AI’s capabilities.

“If they go in a certain direction, they will continue to explore that,” Mahdavi said. “One thing we can learn from this is to nudge kids and show them there are other things you can do with AI tools or get them to think about it another way.”

The researchers also paid attention to what was missing in the students’ responses, which Mahdavi said was just as important as what they did talk about.

“None of them mentioned anything about ethics or what could be problematic about AI,” she said. “That told us there’s something they aren’t thinking about but should be. We take that into account as we think about future exhibits.”

Making an Impact

The researchers visited the Museum of Science and Industry June 1-2 to conduct the first trial run of three AI-based exhibits they’ve created. One of them is LuminAI, which was developed in Magerko’s Expressive Machinery Lab.

LuminAI is an interactive art installation that allows people to engage in collaborative movement with an AI dance partner. Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State recently held the first performance of AI avatars dancing with human partners in front of a live audience.

Duri Long, a former Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who is now an assistant professor at Northwestern University, designed the second exhibit. KnowledgeNet is an interactive tabletop exhibit in which visitors build semantic networks by adding different characteristics to characters that interact together.

The third exhibit, Data Bites, prompts users to build datasets of pizzas and sandwiches. Their selections train a machine-learning classifier in real time.

Belghith said the exhibits fostered conversations about AI between parents and children.

“The exhibit prototypes successfully engaged children in creative activities,” she said. “Many parents had to pull their kids away to continue their museum tour because the kids wanted more time to try different creations or dance moves.”

Working on a multi-institutional team of investigators, Georgia Tech researchers have helped the state of Georgia become the epicenter for developing K-12 AI educational curriculum nationwide.

The new curriculum introduced by Artificial Intelligence for Georgia (AI4GA) has taught middle school students to use and understand AI. It’s also equipped middle school teachers to teach the foundations of AI.

AI4GA is a branch of a larger initiative, the Artificial Intelligence for K-12 (AI4K12). Funded by the National Science Foundation and led by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Florida, AI4K12 is developing national K-12 guidelines for AI education. 

Bryan Cox, the Kapor research fellow in Georgia Tech’s Constellation Center for Equity in Computing, drove a transformative computer science education initiative when he worked at the Georgia Department of Education. Though he is no longer with the DOE, he persuaded the principal investigators of AI4K12 to use Georgia as their testing ground. He became a lead principal investigator for AI4GA.

“We’re using AI4GA as a springboard to contextualize the need for AI literacy in populations that have the potential to be negatively impacted by AI agents,” Cox said.

Judith Uchidiuno, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, began working on the AI4K12 project as a post-doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon under lead PI Dave Touretzky. Joining the faculty at Georgia Tech enabled her to be an in-the-classroom researcher for AI4GA. She started her Play and Learn Lab at Georgia Tech and hired two research assistants devoted to AI4GA.

Focusing on students from underprivileged backgrounds in urban, suburban, and rural communities, Uchidiuno said her team has worked with over a dozen Atlanta-based schools to develop an AI curriculum. The results have been promising.

“Over the past three years, over 1,500 students have learned AI due to the work we’re doing with teachers,” Uchidiuno said. “We are empowering teachers through AI. They now know they have the expertise to teach this curriculum.”

AI4GA is in its final semester of NSF funding, and the researchers have made their curriculum and teacher training publicly available. The principal investigators from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Florida will use the curriculum as a baseline for AI4K12.

STARTING STUDENTS YOUNG

Though AI is a complex subject, the researchers argue middle schoolers aren’t too young to learn about how it works and the social implications that come with it.

“Kids are interacting with it whether people like it or not,” Uchidiuno said. “Many of them already have smart devices. Some children have parents with smart cars. More and more students are using ChatGPT. 

“They don’t have much understanding of the impact or the implications of using AI, especially data and privacy. If we want to prepare students who will one day build these technologies, we need to start them young and at least give them some critical thinking skills.”

Will Gelder, a master’s student in Uchidiuno’s lab, helped analyze data exploring the benefits of co-designing the teaching curriculum with teachers based on months of working with students and learning how they understand AI. Rebecca Yu, a research scientist in Uchidiuno’s lab, collected data to determine which parts of the curriculum were effective or ineffective.

Through the BridgeUP STEM Program at Georgia Tech, Uchidiuno worked with high school students to design video games that demonstrate their knowledge of AI based on the AI4GA curriculum. Students designed the games using various maker materials in 2D and 3D representations, and the games are currently in various stages of development by student developers at the Play and Learn Lab.  

“The students love creative projects that let them express their creative thoughts,” Gelder said. “Students love the opportunity to break out markers or crayons and design their dream robot and whatever functions they can think of.”

Yu said her research shows that many students demonstrate the ability to understand advanced concepts of AI through these creative projects.

“To teach the concept of algorithms, we have students use crayons to draw different colors to mimic all the possibilities a computer is considering in its decision-making,” Yu said.

“Many other curricula like ours don’t go in-depth about the technical concepts, but AI4GA does. We show that with appropriate levels of scaffolding and instructions, they can learn them even without mathematical or programming backgrounds.” 

EMPOWERING TEACHERS

Cox cast a wide net to recruit middle school teachers with diverse student groups. A former student of his answered the call.

Amber Jones, a Georgia Tech alumna, taught at a school primarily consisting of Black and Latinx students. She taught a computer science course that covered building websites, using Excel, and basic coding.

Jones said many students didn’t understand the value and applications of what her course was teaching until she transitioned to the AI4GA curriculum.

“AI for Georgia curriculum felt like every other lesson tied right back to the general academics,” Jones said. “I could say, ‘Remember how you said you weren’t going to ever use y equals mx plus b? Well, every time you use Siri, she's running y equals mx plus b.’ I saw them drawing the connections and not only drawing them but looking for them.”

Connecting AI back to their other classes, favorite social media platforms, and digital devices helped students understand the concepts and fostered interest in the curriculum.

Jones’s participation in the program also propelled her career forward. She now works as a consultant teaching AI to middle school students. 

“I’m kind of niche in my experiences,” Jones said. “So, when someone says, ‘Hey, we also want to do something with a young population that involves computer science,’ I’m in a small pool of people that can be looked to for guidance.”

AI4GA quickly cultivated a new group of experts within a short timeframe.

“They’ve made their classes their own,” Cox said. “They add their own tweaks. Over the course of the project, the teachers were engaged in cultivating the lessons for their experience and their context based on the identity of their students.”

Parth Arora is the founder of Third Dimension Fitness, a platform for gamified cardio through mixed reality, which was recently acquired by Elbo, an education-focused company based in Singapore. He began his company as a project in the summer of 2022. Since then, it has gained thousands of users and made thousands in revenue each month. Arora is a senior in computer science. He participated in the Spring 2024 Startup Launch, the first cohort to be held outside of the summer program. Below is a Q&A with Arora. 

Did you always want to be an entrepreneur?

I always did. I had my first company, an educational technology app, when I was 16, which ran for about two years. I ended it in my first year of college. I'm from India originally and the vision was to provide resources to the larger mass market of India for extracurricular activities. But, we realized there wasn't a business model. When we tried to make money, we started serving the rich kids. When we tried to serve the market, we didn't make money, which doesn't make investors happy, though we did end up making enough money to repay them.

That didn't stop me; it just gave me more lessons. 

What other experience in entrepreneurship have you had?

I've been involved in entrepreneurship communities at Georgia Tech forever. I was co-director of Startup Exchange, which is where I met a lot of really driven people. I got a chance to build their fellowship program and initiate their first pitch competition, which is now called Summit. I've collaborated with CREATE-X for different events, and I try to attend any event hosted by CREATE-X, Startup Exchange, or ATDC.

Why did you choose to join the spring cohort of Startup Launch this year?

CREATE-X provides everything you need, like legal support, financial support, sales support, mentors, and an introduction to VCs, which is why I decided to join the Launch program. I think all of that boosted our startup’s growth.

Why did you feel like acquisition was the way to go for your company?

I think because I always knew this wasn’t “the” thing I was going to do. This summer I'll be starting to work for Apple on their VisionPro team, and it has a direct conflict-of-interest. They wanted me to stop working on this for a while. So, I felt like this might be a good time to explore the acquisition.  We had really rich content, which had proven to work. We had curated that content after hundreds of customer interviews, and we had advisors from Nike, Disney, and Netflix. I knew that was a strong point, so that's why I knew that acquisition would be a good exit. 

What support have you had in taking the acquisition path?

Seth [Radman, who has had multiple exits himself and is a Startup Launch alumnus] has been guiding me professionally for a while. I met him at previous events through Startup Exchange, but then he recently came to a CREATE-X event. Rahul [Saxena, CREATE-X director], has also been a great support for me since day one. He was the one who suggested Startup Launch to me.

In December of last year, we started monetizing. We were testing different things. It was helpful to share the numbers and the data points with Rahul, mentors, and other people in my cohort so that I was not blindsided, and I could take actions based on the educated analysis of a database. It helped me drive down our customer acquisition cost, increase our customer lifetime value, and didn't keep me in my own bubble.

How were you okay with letting that product go?

It was a tough decision; it was my baby. I'd been working on it 10 to 15 hours a day, at least for the last few months. Rahul and Seth convinced me that if this is not the thing you want to do long-term and you know the market isn't big enough, you should move on to the next thing and put your time and energy there. 

I had to use my brain, and not my heart.

What's the biggest piece of advice that you've received as you developed your company?

Try to never lie to yourself, which is harder than it seems. I've built two companies and worked with several others, and I still lie to myself. When you love your product so much, it's very easy to lie to yourself about how there is a market for it, or people are using it. I think even in the future, I’ll probably be caught doing that, but the best way I've found to overcome that is to surround yourself with people who can tell you when you are doing it and help you see your company the way it is instead of the way you want it to be.

How has this decision affected you so far?

My lifestyle has completely changed, from looking at a dashboard every 10 to 15 minutes, seeing how the product is doing, and burning so many fires every 30 minutes, to being pretty chill. Like, what am I supposed to think about before I go to bed? What am I supposed to do now? Who are the customers I am supposed to be thinking about? It's been interesting, but I think this gives me space to now work on that next venture and have more time to think about what I want to do next.

Do you think you'll want to return to entrepreneurship in the future?

Yes, for sure. All the money I received from the acquisition will also fuel my next venture. My main goal is to grow in this industry. I'm an entrepreneur at heart, so I will be returning to the space soon or building products that people like. 

How are you celebrating this win?

I did celebrate it on our last day with Rahul, my amazing mentor, Margaret [Weniger, who founded Rising Tide], and the other cohort members. I will be celebrating it with a few of my friends because my 21st birthday is coming around, so I'll be celebrating these occasions together. 

But I don't want to take the money out from the company or for anything else, because it’s for my next venture. It shouldn't change my lifestyle at all, so I've kept all that money in a separate place.

What encouragement would you give to students interested in pursuing a startup?

Relative to other colleges, we have a cushion, a sense of security that we will get good jobs. Entrepreneurship is a riskier and more unpredictable path, which I've seen, and I'm personally experiencing right now having to choose between Big Tech versus entrepreneurship. But once you start building it and when you hear from your first customer how you affected the way they live, then there's no going back. Statistically, you'll probably fail, but you won't know until you start building; and if you do fail, it’ll teach you so many valuable lessons that are applicable in whatever career path you choose.

CREATE-X will launch its 12th cohort of Startup Launch on Aug. 29 at 5 p.m. in the Georgia Tech Exhibition Hall. Register today to secure your spot.

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