Dietrich College Awards Seed Grants
By Stacy Kish
The Dietrich College Seed Grant program funded three projects during the fall 2023 grant cycle that explore our understanding of sound, text and statistics.
“Dietrich College’s Seed Grant program aims to catalyze new and ambitious research collaborations across different units in the college, support existing interdisciplinary research projects and develop the foundational data needed to secure large-scale funding,” said Richard Scheines, Bess Family Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor of philosophy. “I’m excited to see how these interdisciplinary groups advance their research and share their findings with community organizations and other experts in their fields.”
Laurie Heller, professor in the Department of Psychology, has joined Daniel Rosenberg Munoz, assistant professor in the School of Design, on a project that examines the ventriloquist illusion, the auditory-visual interaction that is based on how an object’s visual location biases the apparent direction of a sound source. The team aims to examine the cues from gestures and motion to test the agreement between sound and an object. The work will provide insight into how to improve and enhance interactive auditory displays on technology products for more accurate human perception and understanding. The team plans to demonstrate their findings through educational outreach institutions, such as a collaboration with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.
Christopher Lowy, assistant professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of Modern Languages, has partnered with Raja Adal, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, to organize a two-day conference that brings together a diverse group of scholars and technical professionals to examine the role of Unicode in mediating global scripts and interoperability between devices in the digital age. The Unicode standard allows data to be transported through many different platforms, devices, and applications without corruption. During the conference, participants will discuss some of the most pressing issues with Unicode, especially for languages that fall outside the Latin script. Lowy and Adal aim to use this inaugural conference to engage larger international academic institutions, corporations, governments, and digitally underrepresented communities to continue these efforts.
Whitney Laemmli and Christopher Phillips in the Department of History, Alex John London in the Department of Philosophy, and Alex Reinhart and Joel Greenhouse in the Department of Statistics & Data Science have received a seed grant to examine the shifts in statistical science as it evolved during the 20th century. They have launched a weekly reading group exploring the history of data and statistics with faculty and students from the participating departments. Emerging from the reading group will be plans for a multi-day workshop to discuss the interrelationship between the history of data, big and small, and the history of science. Finally, the team is developing an online, open-access data archive curating historically grounded and contextualized data sets that will enable courses teaching statistical methods.
“Crossing disciplinary boundaries is a major priority for the college, and supporting these collaborations is an efficient way to enable this kind of work to get done,” said Julie Downs, associate dean of research for Dietrich College and professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences. “I think it’s really important that the college puts our faculty in a position to do cutting-edge research and be successful in getting external grant funding that will expand the impact of the projects.”
The Dietrich College Seed Grant program supports projects from the Bess Family Chair held by the dean for up to $25,000 to establish preliminary data for future grants at larger funding organizations.