Oberlin College announced the awardees of the AI Micro Grant Program on April 9 in the Campus Digest as part of the ongoing Year of AI Exploration. The micro grant has been awarded to nine members of faculty and staff in fields from Dance to Business to Environmental Studies.
This program was developed to provide faculty, students, and staff short-term funding to explore uses of artificial intelligence. According to the Center for Information Technology’s website, projects that have been awarded the micro grant strive to promote cross-disciplinary thinking about implementing AI in learning environments and span a wide range of disciplines.
Assistant Professor of Dance and Comparative American Studies Al Evangelista’s project “GenAI Impact on Digital” examines AI’s influence on global disinformation through data science and humanities research. He mentioned in an email to the Review that the micro grant will be used to fund undergraduate research students and the tools needed to process text databases across different regions and languages.
“We’re analyzing thousands of fact-checked claims from South and Southeast Asia to understand how AI is reshaping the spread of misleading content — who it targets, how narratives are constructed, and what the consequences look like for real communities,” Evangelista said. “It’s a collaboration between Oberlin and Virginia Tech pairing cultural analysis with data science in a novel way.”
Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology John Petersen, OC ’88, will also be using the grant for data research. His project will use AI to gather and organize civic event data to promote more sustainable communities and streamline information sharing.
“My AI grant is designed to figure out a way we could use AI to gather together all local things that are happening and insert them into a community calendar,” Petersen said. “So we’re trying to build local self-reliance using a tool that can look around and say, ‘What’s going on that people are publicizing, and how we can get that information shared more easily within communities?’”
As someone in the field of environmental studies, Petersen emphasized the importance of understanding the ethics of using generative AI while acknowledging the energy resources used by it.
“For me, part of understanding it is figuring out how I can potentially use it to do good things that benefit the environment,” Petersen explained. “And that’s not me making a statement that I think AI is beneficial to the environment. It’s me making a statement that AI exists, and because it exists, it helps me to try to figure out how I can use it to advance my goals, which are about building a stronger, greater sustainability, which is about people, the economy, and the environment.”
Department of Psychology Research Technician Peter Naegele’s project, “Development of a Socratic AI Tutoring Agent,” centers around the development of an AI tutor for PSYC 300: Research Methods II. The program will use logic-based inquiry to help students understand the statistical software SPSS and data analysis. It is designed to avoid providing direct replies and promoting academic dishonesty.
“The goal is to create a model for future AI development that avoids the pitfalls of generic tools,” Naegele wrote in an email to the Review. “While standard AI often provides direct answers, effectively facilitating academic dishonesty, my tutor employs a tri-layered framework that puts pedagogical integrity and student privacy first.”
“Development of a Software Generation System,” a project from Assistant Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts Eli Stine, OC ’14, uses AI and real-time machine listening as a co-performer in a live chamber music ensemble. He plans to have an ensemble of performances and use machine learning to generate notation music for them to play.
“It would be awesome to take this work, which is being applied in the context of a bigger chamber ensemble piece, and bring that to Oberlin to have a performance,” Stine said. “So ultimately, it would be making the software, but the reality of it is that it becomes real when it’s performed, and you can hear it and experience it live.”
Stine isn’t the only professor experimenting with using AI in live musical performance. Assistant Professor of African American and African Diasporic Musics Courtney-Savali Andrews, OC ’06, aims to investigate the use of generative AI in live musical contexts as a “constrained drafting collaborator.”
Other projects explore uses of AI in administration. A project entitled “Managing Unwanted Phone Calls,” from Office Support Assistant LaKesha Gage, hopes to explore the more operational and administrative use of generative AI to moderate disruptive communication. Information Technology Project Manager Josh Vallee’s project is also on the administrative side of AI. It is called “Meeting Engagement by Leveraging AI Note Taking” and is a study on how automated meeting documentation affects collaboration and productivity.
More projects include Lead IT Business Analyst Ryan Schlothauer’s program designed to test a secure AI system’s ability to handle routine employee benefits inquiries while managing potential risks. Chair of Business Eric Lin’s project entitled “Pilot Grading and Feedback AI Workflow & AI Assisted Oral Assessment” is a pedagogical pilot initiative exploring AI tools to improve grading consistency and scale oral exams using AI voice-agents.
