We are grateful for the enthusiastic participation in our EDU grants program. While this program has now closed, we invite you to explore CustomGPT with a free 7-day trial. Experience how our AI can revolutionize your projects and research!
We’re delighted with the response and progress of our AI research grants for colleges and university initiatives. In this, the second round of grant awards, we’re proud to welcome three more recipients, following the successful awards to our previous grant winners.
The new grants are going to professors at Xavier University in Ohio, Washington and Lee University in Virginia, the University of Maryland College Park, and the University of Southampton (UK).
The CustomGPT.ai faculty grant initiative is part of our commitment to fostering innovation and the practical application of generative AI in learning and education, particularly across education use cases. Each grant, valued at $3,000, provides access to our zero-code business-grade platform for building AI solutions, including chatbots and AI assistants.
The CustomGPT.ai faculty grant initiative is an ongoing opportunity for faculty members to make a significant impact in the field of AI. With a deadline to apply of May 31st, 2024, we encourage interested individuals to submit their applications as soon as possible. We’ll continue to review proposals and award grants on a rolling basis.
Let’s learn more about the latest recipients’ plans for CustomGPT.ai in the CustomGPT.ai research grant program.
Dr. Jarrod Humphrey, Williams College of Business, Xavier University – A Chatbot for AI Ethics and Honesty
Dr. Jarrod Humphrey of the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Williams College of Business at Xavier University, Ohio, plans to use the CustomGPT.ai research grant to develop a comprehensive chatbot devoted to AI ethics and honesty for use by students, faculty, and practitioners.
Dr. Humphrey’s entrepreneurship students previously developed a minimum viable product (MVP) AI model to help students learn about AI in an academically honest and ethical way and to prevent cheating. The chatbot, D’Artagnan, was featured in the press with Dr. Humphrey describing it as a “world first” trained on two million words of data on ethical AI use from 200 institutions. The purpose of this bot is to help students use AI ethically and to help “develop the future of education.” He further says it’s up to professors to make sure students are prepared for the future with AI “here to stay.”
Philosophy professors Dr. Erin Taylor and Dr. Nicholas Laskowski – AI for Ethical Evaluations in Research Oversight
Philosophy professors Dr. Erin Taylor, Washington and Lee University, and Dr. Nicholas Laskowski, the University of Maryland, College Park, plan to use their CustomGPT.ai research grant to evaluate how generative AI can be used to “assist Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in their ethical evaluations in research oversight,” including the accuracy and appropriateness of the consent forms required in biomedical research.
Dr. Alessio Bellato, University of Southampton U.K.- Enhancing Psychological Well-Being and Emotional Regulation
Dr. Alessio Bellato, a psychology professor at the University of Southampton, intends to use the CustomGPT.ai grant to develop and test a chatbot that can enhance the “psychological well-being and emotional regulation in children and young people,” especially the growing number in circumstances that make it difficult to access timely interventions.
Five CustomGPT.ai AI Research Grants Awarded to Date
The three new awards join the two previous successful proposals announced last week. Those are Professor Michael Klymkowsky, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Dr. Ann Riedl, Front Range Community College, developing a Socratic tutor for Introduction to Biology students, and Doug Laney, an infonomics expert at the University of Illinois, building a fictitious company for MBA Infonomics students to interview as well as an essay grading bot.
We already have institutions and students using CustomGPT.ai to build zero-code business-grade custom GPT bots with technology based on OpenAI’s powerful GPT-4:
- Levin Labs: Innovative Scientific Communication via Interactive Knowledge Retrieval
- Per Bergfors, Copenhagen Business Academy: Demonstrating and Inspiring the Implementation of AI to Improve Learning
- AI Ace: Securing a $1.2M Valuation by Creating the Future of Education
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship: A One-Stop Shop of Guidance, Events, Resources and Classes for Entrepreneurs
- Sébastien Laye (entrepreneur and economist): Using AI to Answer Detailed Economic Queries
- Lehigh University: Making a Century of University History and News Available to Students
Discover the full CustomGPT Case Study Library
Faculty Members are Encouraged to Apply Quickly for CustomGPT.ai AI Research Grants
As a reminder, the closing date for grant applications is May 31st, 2024.
Our grants initiative demonstrates our confidence both in our platform and in the largely unrealized potential of generative AI chatbots, agents, and knowledge repositories for enhancing student learning experiences, supporting tutors and graders, improving course delivery, and empowering academic research programs as well as many other use cases that students, professors, and entrepreneurs will want to explore.
What We Offer
Successful applicants will receive a CustomGPT.ai Premium License free, giving them six months of access to our advanced AI tools valued at approximately $3,000. This package supports the creation of up to 100 custom chatbots, ensuring ample resources for impactful research and teaching projects.
Each faculty grant recipient will be supported by comprehensive documentation and potential one-on-one sessions to maximize the opportunity of using our AI tools in educational and research endeavors.
For full details of the grant available, who can apply, and how to apply, visit CustomGPT.ai Announces AI Research Grants for College Faculties
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a faculty AI research grant proposal stronger?
Faculty proposals are usually stronger when they solve a specific academic problem for a clearly named audience and use a defined source set. The latest grant recipients are focused on concrete use cases such as AI ethics, academic honesty, and research oversight rather than open-ended experimentation. Dr. Michael Levin highlighted the value of a tightly scoped knowledge base when he said, u0022Omg finally, I can retire! A high-school student made this chat-bot trained on our papers and presentationsu0022. In practice, a strong proposal should say who will use the assistant, what materials it will be grounded in, and how success will be measured.
How can professors reduce hallucinations in an AI research assistant?
Professors usually lower hallucination risk by grounding the assistant in approved course, lab, or policy materials and requiring citation-backed answers. The platform uses retrieval-augmented generation and citation support, and the provided benchmark states it outperformed OpenAI in RAG accuracy. A good rollout process is to start with a narrow corpus, test real faculty and student questions, review the cited sources, and expand only after accuracy is consistent.
What can faculty do if they miss an AI research grant deadline?
If a grant deadline has passed, a short pilot can still give you useful evidence for a later proposal or departmental funding request. Ontop reported a 60x response-time improvement, from 20 minutes to 20 seconds, and said its AI agent saved 130 hours per month while handling over 100 questions weekly. Those are the kinds of metrics a faculty pilot can aim to collect: response time, usage volume, hours saved, and answer quality on real questions. A small pilot will not replace grant funding, but it can make the next application much stronger.
Can faculty build a research chatbot on large archives without coding?
Yes. The platform is described as a no-code chatbot builder and supports knowledge ingestion from websites, documents, audio, video, and URLs, including PDF, DOCX, TXT, CSV, HTML, XML, JSON, audio, and video files up to 100 MB each. Stephanie Warlick described the workflow this way: u0022Check out CustomGPT.ai where you can dump all your knowledge to automate proposals, customer inquiries and the knowledge base that exists in your head so your team can execute without you.u0022 For faculty teams, that same approach can be used for papers, course files, lab documentation, and institutional archives without building custom ingestion scripts first.
How should professors frame an AI grant proposal for student or lab use?
A strong proposal usually reads like a mini implementation plan: define the users, list the source materials, describe the task the assistant will improve, and explain how you will evaluate outcomes. Barry Barresi wrote, u0022Powered by my custom-built Theory of Change AIM GPT agent on the CustomGPT.ai platform. Rapidly Develop a Credible Theory of Change with AI-Augmented Collaboration.u0022 That is a useful model for faculty proposals too. Instead of asking for funding to u0022try AI,u0022 show the theory of change behind the assistant, such as improving ethical AI use, speeding research oversight, reducing repetitive lab questions, or supporting student learning.
Related Resources
These reads offer more context on the growing reach of CustomGPT.ai research and the broader ideas behind the platform.
- First Grant Recipients — Meet the initial researchers and educators selected through the CustomGPT.ai research grants program.
- AI Learning White Paper — Explore CustomGPT.ai’s perspective on how AI is shaping the future of learning and knowledge access.
- Enterprise Knowledge Search — See how AI-powered search helps organizations surface accurate internal knowledge at scale.
- How CustomGPT.ai Works — A practical overview of how CustomGPT.ai turns your content into a reliable AI assistant.
- Newest Education Grant Pioneers — Learn about the latest recipients advancing education-focused research with support from CustomGPT.ai.
- AI Photo Album Search — This walkthrough shows how AI vision can make large personal image libraries easier to explore and organize.