Elementary AI

So, Professor Barnes, I wanna ask you about the impact of NSF support over your career.

You've got a number of grants over the years.

Can you talk a little bit about what difference that has made for you?

I'm extremely grateful and lucky to have gotten the amount of support, over $26 million, over my career, and mostly it has all been because I have a strong belief that, um, education is where we should be investing, but also in a research way, and also by building tools.

So I'm a computer scientist and an educator in my heart, and so I'm always building educational technologies and AI to try to learn from data to build systems that help students, but also to bring teachers into this sort of world of technology and how we can integrate computer science with education, but also to bring everyday people into learning about computer science and AI because increasingly our lives have become more and more digital.

And so everyone actually needs to have access, and that's, uh, really where the National Science Foundation has given me a platform to involve people from-- of all ages, from little kids up through, you know, K-12, college students, graduate students, and faculty like myself and also my collaborators who are here and others.

So I think that, you know, there's kind of a unified vision that many of us who apply for our National Science Foundation funding have, is that we want to leverage not only the funds to not only advance research and technology, but also to bring that impact to other people.

And I think you would see if you looked at my trajectory of projects over the years that actually a large portion of the projects that I do have this component of reaching out to teachers or students or the community and expanding access, and I'm super privileged to be able to do that.