Award for Inclusion Research

Google Award Image
Thursday, January 21, 2021
 

Principle Investigator (PI): Sharon Tettegah
Co-Principle Investigator: Timothy Sherwood
CBSR Director; CBSR Affiliated Faculty

Dr. Tettegah and co-PI Timothy Sherwood, a UCSB professor of computer science, were awarded a 2020 Award for Inclusion Research from Google AI. Their proposal, “Iterative Design of a Black Studies Research Computing Initiative Through ‘Flipped Research,’ ” was one of 16 chosen from more than 100 applications from universities around the world. The award, which comes with a one-year grant of $60,000, will help establish collaboration of UCSB’s Department of Computer Science and the CBSR. At its core, the collaboration is aimed at bringing the power of computational science to underserved Black and Latino student populations. The “flipped research” model, Sherwood and Tettegah wrote in their proposal, is intended to put “student scholars in the position of identifying and refining computing research topics that connect directly to their lived experiences and then proposing those ideas for topics of research by the broader community. Student teams, working through an iterative design process with faculty and graduate student mentors, will work to refine their broader research questions into a form similar to a traditional call for proposals (CFP). These CFPs can then be shared publicly and/or presented in person to interested program managers and industry leaders to inform their future research investment.”The interdisciplinary computing research, they said, would bridges Black Studies and Computer Science to create a new and student-driven foundation for understanding issues of personal significance through a diverse lens.