The Clearsky project is an AI-assisted social media client for Bluesky. Effectively, it’s a personal content moderator and social media assistant. The project aims to use generative AI to solve a number of issues with the current social media environment: Overload. The sheer volume of posts in unmanagable. Clearsky uses summarization to help. Toxicity. Clearsky summaries are meant to be neutral in tone and provide warnings where the underlying content is profane, incendiary, violent, or in other ways objectionable.

The CARES project stands for Counseling, Assistance, Resources, Empathy, and Support and is an ongoing research project being conducted with data scientist Sherry Towers and anti-violence pioneer Gary Slutkin. The goal is to see whether the current state of large language models (LLMs) is sufficient to provide support to victims or bystanders of bullying behaviors in schools. The project remains very much at the research stage as the PIs investigate various possible interventions before beginning any trials.

IBIS stands for Injured Bird Information System. The project began when one of our principals, Stacy, and her husband Ed helped rescue a mother duck and 12 ducklings who had gotten disoriented and stuck in the middle of a highway. Not knowing what to do to help the ducks, they called Chicago Bird Collision Monitors who got the ducks to safety. Soon after, Stacy and Ed discovered that the texting system the organization was using to organize its volunteers meant that every volunteer got every notification independent of their specialty, equipment, available, or location.