Goals
Our vision for the Center for Empathic Training using XR+AI is part think-tank, part design studio and part R&D laboratory that tackles the important societal challenges such as social connectedness in cyberhuman systems, empathy in critical situations and non-critical decision-making, and provides innovative and tested usable/scalable solutions. We will begin our work focusing on healthcare and law enforcement domains and will expand into other domains as we build critical mass.
Workshops
Even though the core team assembled for this seed grant covers the typical relevant disciplines (AI, XR, design, empathy, human-computer interaction, education) for the initial phase of the proposed work, we expect to add other researchers from UIUC (e.g., anthropology, social psychology, neuroscience,) as we explore the intersectionality of user groups and XR+AI in our workshops, and as we develop a roadmap for the future of the Center.
Roadmap
We will employ graduate research assistants to research state-of-the art practices of empathy training and XR+AI technologies, with a focus on the identification of gaps that can be addressed in Phase 2 and follow on grant proposals. Our aim is to develop a roadmap/framework report of approximately one hundred pages that will direct the research agenda of the proposed center, including an ontology of empathy and a resource bank for LLM fine-tuning that will inform our XR+AI developments as funding is secured.