Una Thacker, Community Engaged Learning director and Nathan Ensmenger, Informatics associate professor, have received a prestigious Public Interest Technology University Network Challenge grant.
The $90,000 grant is for their Serve AI project, which will expand the resources for the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering’s Serve IT program. Thacker is the project manager. Ensmenger is the principal investigator.
Ensmenger said the grant will bring a new generation of tools, including Generative AI, to Serve IT teams.
“It will allow our students to acquire skills in Generative AI for the purpose of developing new technologies,” Ensmenger said, “and hopefully to provide services to our clients where they can use Generative AI to support their member organizations,”
Serve IT, in conjunction with Teach IT, matches IU undergraduate students, most of them Luddy students, with Bloomington-area non-profits and government organizations to build technology capacity. Students provide consulting services, develop websites and data visualizations, provide accessibility updates and trainings, and provide tech education for local afterschool clubs, supporting the technology needs for local organization to better meet their own missions.
“Serve AI will help us expand what we’re able to do now,” said Thacker, who runs both programs. “It will provide funding to give us space, time and extra resources with grad students who can help us explore what AI can do for smaller organizations.”
Thacker said those resources would include tech toys such as robots, bots and kits to “allow kids to explore AI in ways they never would have been able to before.”
Also, many local organizations struggle to keep their websites and data up to date. Generative AI could serve as a support for that.
Ensmenger said the grant will help them extend the scope of Serve IT and ensure they have the newest technologies of interest to students and clients. It potentially could allow them to develop partnerships with IU-Indianapolis.
“We want to develop more tools to allow them to understand their own organizations,” he said. “It helps them as far as who’s coming, who’s not coming? What’s the gender balance? What’s the racial balance? What’s the level of satisfaction with our services? That’s very hard for smaller volunteer-run organizations to do.”
Each semester, more than 100 IU students are involved in experiential learning projects through Serve IT projects, helping nonprofits solve real-world problems. Serve IT has worked with 137 clients on 342 projects, providing a financial value of more than $5 million to the local community in technology support they would never have been able to afford.
“It has a significant impact and is very good for our students,” Ensmenger said. “It allows them to engage in real-world projects.”
The Public Interest Technology University Network gathers like-minded universities to develop new curriculum, partnerships, internships, and educational opportunities for STEM students to prepare them for important roles at Silicon Valley firms.
It has created a Challenge, which is a prestigious grant program that seeds and supports projects to grow public interest in technology at the university level. It aims to foster collaborations, encourage new ideas and incentivize resource and information sharing among the 63 network members. It’s designed to prepare a new generation of technologists who understand technology’s societal impacts and who have the skills to build justice, social welfare and the public good into its design.
This year’s challenge targeted projects in educational offerings that foster cross-disciplinary perspectives and career pipeline/placement efforts to develop the public interest technology workforce in government, industry and social impact organizations.
An evaluation committee of PIT leaders from across society, academia, private industry and philanthropy selected the projects. IU is one of 14 challenge winners from around the nation, and the only one from the Big Ten.
Since 2018, the network challenge has awarded more than $15 million to 145 projects that have built new courses, research centers, community and government partnerships, fellowships, internships and more. Projects focus on equity and justice, increasing access to PIT education and careers, and advancing technology that serves all communities, especially those historically excluded from technology design.
Ensmenger said interest in Serve AI has reached the university presidential level.
“It’s about creating a set of structures to help STEM students engage in public service.”