TRAILS AI Institute Announces Second Round of Seed Funding

The Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) has announced its second round of seed funding, jumpstarting a series of interdisciplinary projects that align with the institute’s vision of advancing artificial intelligence (AI) systems that benefit all of society.

The five grants announced today—totaling $685,000—will support efforts to improve AI-generated health information, enhance safety and trust in autonomous vehicles, address education disparities driven by race and location, examine AI-generated social media used during a pandemic or natural disaster, and build new frameworks for large language models (LLMs) employed in academia.

The projects involve participation from faculty and students in all four of TRAILS’ primary academic institutions: the University of Maryland, George Washington University, Morgan State University and Cornell University.

“This latest round of seed funding supports research and innovation that can have a direct impact on how people stay healthy, learn and travel—areas of our lives that will benefit immensely from AI systems that are more ethical, inclusive, trustworthy and efficient,” said Hal Daumé III, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland who is the director of TRAILS.

Like the inaugural round of TRAILS funding unveiled in January, this latest cohort of projects was selected based on connectivity to the core values driving much of the institute’s activities—developing trustworthy AI algorithms, empowering users to make sense of AI systems, training the next generation of AI leaders, and promoting inclusive AI governance strategies.

The new grantees will interact with previously funded seed grant teams, Daumé added, learning from and supporting each other while collectively contributing to TRAILS’ shared body of knowledge.

TRAILS was launched in May 2023 with a $20 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Since then, faculty, students and postdocs affiliated with TRAILS have been active, coordinating AI workshops and seminars on Capitol Hill, hosting a summer academy to empower future AI innovators, partnering with an immersive language museum to explore the use and efficacy of machine translation software, and much more.

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