Funded Research Projects
"Investigating the Impact of Scaffolded Ethics Autobiography on Engineering Identity and Students' Career Interests"
October 2024 - Current
Funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) Award# 2417377
PI: Dayoung Kim
Co-PI: Marie Paretti (Department of Engineering Education, VT)
Project Overview: This project aims to serve the national interest by designing, implementing, and evaluating a new engineering education pedagogy called Scaffolded Ethics Autobiography (SEA), through which engineering students construct their own moral narratives, the stories of their moral lives. SEA is assumed to promote students' professional engineering identity, which is an engineering identity with explicit ethics components. Engineering educators have explored how to help students shape engineering identity, as it is believed to be associated with persistence in the profession. At the same time, undergraduate engineering programs must include instruction in professional ethics to meet accreditation criteria. This project will bridge the separate efforts to facilitate engineering students' engineering identity development and professional ethical development through SEA, which opens new possibilities to effectively achieve both goals. This project will help engineering students grow as ethical engineers with strong intentions to persist in engineering careers, which aligns with significant national interests. In Phase 1, this project will design the SEA module, including the necessary materials for the SEA module implementation, such as module description and the assessment rubric, after constructing a new model of professional engineering identity. In Phase 2, this project will evaluate the effectiveness of the SEA module in promoting engineering students' moral narratives and professional engineering identity development. Existing measures in engineering identity and newly developed assessment rubric will be used for the evaluation. In Phase 3, this project will connect the SEA module with engineering students' career decisions, by examining how engineering students' engineering identity, whose development will be facilitated by the SEA module, is related to their career choices.
"Research: Exploring How AI Engineers Perceive and Develop Translational Ethical Competency"
August 2024 - Current
Funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) Award# 2412398
PI: Hoda Eldardiry (Department of Computer Science, VT)
Co-PIs: Dayoung Kim and Qin Zhu (Department of Engineering Education, VT)
Project Overview: The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled technologies is transforming the world. AI has brought promise and peril to nearly every aspect of human life. Nurturing AI engineers who can design AI systems responsibly has become a key objective from business and policy perspectives. For engineering educators committed to supporting students to become competent and responsible engineers, thoughtful consideration of how to effectively incorporate ethical principles into the classroom is paramount. However, translating existing research-based AI ethics tools, such as ethics principles, into engineering practice and education is not easy. Ethical principles are often too abstract to be integrated into design practices, as they do not provide clear explanations or procedural details on how they can be integrated into technical practice. Therefore, scholars have recently called for a transition in AI ethics research toward a translational approach, which focuses on ensuring that AI practitioners can implement AI ethics tools such as ethical principles into actual AI systems designs. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence for the extent to which engineers integrate these ethical principles into their daily practices of AI developers, which generates challenges for engineering educators to incorporate these resources into their own teaching and educational research. This research aims to advance the fundamental knowledge of the formation of future AI engineers poised to innovate responsibly and construct advanced engineering systems empowered by AI technologies. It will investigate a practical competency critical for socially responsible AI engineering. This includes translational ethical competency, or the ability to translate general ethical principles and values into specific decisions in AI engineering practices in the day-to-day work of AI engineers.
"Building Capacity for Research in Technology-Based Social Entrepreneurship Education for the Next Generation of Engineering Leaders"
October 2023 - Current
Funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) Award# 2321188
PI: Dayoung Kim
Project Overview: Despite the emphasis on both entrepreneurship and social responsibility for engineering students, education and research on the two topics have been mostly separate efforts. Technology-based social entrepreneurship education for engineers has ample potential to give engineering students the opportunity to become socially responsible engineering leaders with an entrepreneurial mindset. However, very little research on the topic has been conducted in the field of engineering education. This project aims to advance understanding of how engineers who have launched technology social ventures identify business opportunities that can fulfill the goal of utilizing technology to solve societal problems and the required competencies for successful technology-based social entrepreneurship. Based on this knowledge, the project team will develop a measurement instrument to assess these competencies in undergraduate engineering students. The research findings and the resulting instrument will provide a basis for technology-based social entrepreneurship education for engineering students and students from other disciplines who intend to collaborate with engineers.
"Fostering Regional Innovation Ecosystem in the State of Virginia: Examining University Administrators’ Perspectives"
March 2023 - June 2023
Funded by 4-VA
PI: Dayoung Kim
Project Overview: Universities play a significant role in the economic and workforce development of the region. Particularly, regional universities with engineering programs can play instrumental roles in fostering the regional innovation ecosystem, a complex system that includes many components to facilitate entrepreneurial activities, by serving as a regional hub for technology entrepreneurship. One of the universities’ most commonly discussed roles in the regional innovation ecosystem is supplying students with entrepreneurial intentions. However, as regional contexts influence entrepreneurial activities in the region, the contexts may also affect how academic institutions contribute to the regional innovation ecosystem. This project aims to establish knowledge in the expert opinion on the roles, opportunities, and challenges of academic institutions in fostering the regional innovation ecosystem in the specific regional context, the state of Virginia.
"Exploring AI Ethics Policy Concerns and Career Pathways of the AI Professionals"
Oct 2022 - June 2023
Funded by the Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment - Policy Destination Area (ISCE-PDA), Virginia Tech
PI: Dayoung Kim
Co-PIs: Qin Zhu (Department of Engineering Education, VT) and Hoda Eldardiry (Department of Computer Science, VT)
Project Overview: Formulating effective ethics policies for AI is encountering at least two daunting challenges. First, policymakers are often behind the curve when it comes to designing ethics policies responsive to advances in AI. There has been a disconnect between ethics policies and guidelines and actual research and practice in AI. Effective AI ethics policymaking thus will benefit from the expertise and critical participation of AI professionals. It also requires that the professional curriculum for future AI scientists and engineers be informed by the expertise and concerns of working professionals. Second, in professional education, scientists and engineers have limited opportunities to learn about how to contribute to science and technology policymaking with their expertise. Students in AI-related professional programs are unaware of possible career pathways through which their expertise can contribute to policymaking or they can transition their future careers from AI-related fields to policy analysis or advocacy. To address these concerns, this project explores how scientists and engineers working in AI-related fields (e.g., machine learning, cybersecurity, robotics, and data analytics) particularly those who have received policy training as part of their professional education: (1) perceive ethics policy topics and skills central to their professional work; (2) have developed their careers that either focus on AI policy or are responsive to policy concerns.