SBIR Phase I: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Personalized Employability Curriculum (APEC)

The broader/commercial impact of this NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project begins with an online self-assessment by middle-school girls to identify their innate interests within the fields of entrepreneurship, science, technology, or engineering. Current U.S. trends show a high attrition of girls with interests in these fields, beginning at the middle school level. There is a subsequent drop-off over the ensuing academic years, and this results in small numbers of women occupying these types of roles in their adult careers. The assessment analysis and personalized roadmap will help clarify, support, and nurture the individual’s journey in their growth and development towards their career choices including careers in STEM and entrepreneurship. Ongoing refinement and enhancement of the assessment tool will help inform needed changes to the educational curriculum and/or shifts in societal thinking to help close the ongoing gap in women occupying highly skilled roles. The potential commercial and socioeconomic impact of the assessment and follow-on resources defines a marketable product with associated workforce that spans across the family, academic, governmental, and societal institutions. The technical innovation in this project is a unique framework assessing innate interest in the fields of entrepreneurship, science, technology, or engineering and leveraging these data to create a personalized artificial intelligence (AI)-driven career exploration, skills development, and employability curriculum. The goal is to confirm that the use of deep learning to provide these girls with a dynamic career exploration roadmap can successfully counter the common societal forces that negatively impact their pursuit of innate interests and development of the skills necessary for careers as entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, and engineers. It is hypothesized that early identification of these innate interests preempts identity stereotypes. To combat confirmation bias that girls aren’t good at the fundamental skills needed for these careers, machine learning and AI-enabled data aggregation is used to correlate these innate traits with resources that foster associated job skills, offer opportunities and challenges that are suitable to the user, and provide opportunities to connect with successful role models to address the lack of representation of women in these areas. The initial scope of the project will target middle school girls and their parents/guardians with expansion to the broader audiences of teachers, mentors, coaches, and society in general. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.