Academia should be an easy place to find just the expert you need, right?
Not always.
Even within a single university, researchers in one department may not know what another professor in the same department is doing — or how they might support one another. Researchers in a different university would have even less idea what their colleagues elsewhere might be doing, unless they are active collaborators. Networking among academics even in the same field is less common than you might expect; networking among scholars in different fields is often based on chance encounters.
Thus, it’s difficult to use university resources to address real-world challenges when you don’t always know what the resources are.
“Academia is built ground-up,” said Karl Putz, DPI’s associate director of R&D programs. “Every professor runs their own fiefdom, and knowledge about the equipment or anything else is really, really siloed.”
That’s where the Innovative Matching Platform for Academic Collaboration and Teaming (IMPACT) comes in.
A team effort
The seed of IMPACT was planted when DPI Resident Faculty Vishal Sachdev, clinical assistant professor of business administration and academic director of business analytics degrees, was looking for a project for his students in the Master of Science of Business Analytics (MSBA) program in the fall of 2023.
He and Sam Miller, at the time the relationship manager in DPI’s R&D program, came to Marcia Silva, DPI’s associate director of R&D at the time, and asked, “How do you match grants with researchers?”
“I explained to them the multiple tools that I have to go through,” Silva said, and in the course of the conversation she and Miller realized that that process was similar to Miller’s process, but from the industry perspective.
What began as two projects — one for Miller to find researchers for corporate funding opportunities and the other for Silva to find funding opportunities for researchers — became one tool.
Sachdev said DPI treated it as a consulting project, “where the students were consultants and Marcia and Sam were the clients,” with Sachdev providing strategic guidance along the way. The students gained real-world experience with artificial intelligence and large language models, and DPI received some valuable help.
Once the students finished their project and graduated, they handed it over to Research Software Engineer Karan Jogi, who, with help from Software Engineering Lead Sumit Tokkar, began to expand and develop it, taking it from a proof of concept into a product.
With Jogi as technical lead, DPI Business Analyst
“It was a very collaborative type of work,” Silva said.
Bridges, not silos
The concept behind IMPACT is simple: use AI to scrape academic journals to find faculty members working in a given academic domain. With a few keystrokes you can find researchers working in, for example public health, regardless of whether they work directly in public health/policy, or in medicine, sociology, biostatistics, or another field.
Here’s an example in response to the prompt, “climate modeling”:
3 Full Name: Akintomide A. Akinsanola
Relevance: Akintomide A. Akinsanola’s research includes evaluating climate models and their projections of precipitation extremes in the context of climate change, particularly focusing on the Sahel region and the United States.
Field: Climate Modeling
Methods: Model evaluation, statistical analysis, climate projection
Tools: CMIP5, CMIP6, regional climate models
One of six scholars listed in response to the prompt, Akinsanola is an assistant professor at UIC.
(It’s also worth noting that IMPACT goes beyond STEM fields. Type in “Shakespeare” and it returns nine results, including UIUC English Professor Curtis Perry, whose area of expertise is early modern English literature and culture; and Eric Nyberg, a professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science who has used computational linguistics to turn modern English into Shakespearean language.)
At the moment IMPACT includes primarily University of Illinois System researchers, but it will expand to include more institutions. In the four to five months it’s been available, IMPACT’s reach has grown from 200 researchers to 40,000. After a presentation from Putz at DPI’s partners meeting in September, international universities may join in as well.
Ultimately, the chatbot feature of IMPACT will enable a user — an academic or a layperson — to type in a prompt like, “What is the University of Illinois doing in quantum computing research?” and receive a general 50,000-foot overview. Or ask the strengths of a nearby university, to better facilitate collaboration, or ask, “based on the strengths of the nearby institutions, what societal challenges can we address?”
“There are a lot of good, interesting tools you can make,” Putz said.
Where we go from here
An alpha version of IMPACT is currently available and has attracted some interest from public-sector agencies. In addition to funding for more developers to flesh out the program, DPI is also looking for users to help refine both its functionality and user interface.
If you are interested in trying IMPACT, contact Karan Jogi at kjogi2@uillinois.edu.
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Author: Jeanie Chung