Harrell Wins Grants to Advance Research in Digital Technology & Social Science

Former CASBS fellow (2014-15) Fox Harrell, associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been awarded several grants – including one from the National Science Foundation (NSF) – to advance research at the intersection of social science and digital technology.

The grants, amounting to $1.35 million for a variety of projects that are both local and global in scope, will help facilitate work that develops new forms of computational narrative, gaming, social media, and related digital media based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts.

Some of Harrell’s research was developed while he was in-residence at CASBS. He and collaborators at his MIT lab virtually conducted a number of studies on the impacts of avatars on performance and engagement in a computer science learning game that since have been published. They also pioneered an approach using artificial intelligence techniques to uncover stereotyping and bias in virtual identity systems. This work informed the NSF grant he received, the proposal for which also was written while he was at CASBS.

Read the MIT press release on Harrell’s research projects and grant awards here.

In June 2015, to kick-off CASBS’s partnership with The Long Now Foundation, Harrell was the Center’s inaugural speaker at The Long Now’s salon series held at The Interval in San Francisco. Read about the partnership and Harrell’s salon talk here.

Harrell is founder and director of MIT’s Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab).