Conference: NSF Student Travel Grant for the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society (RCAIS25)

This proposal will support about eight doctoral students at U.S. institutions to travel to the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society in October 2025. The Summit seeks to explore the future of responsible computing for human-centered AI, health, sustainability, and policy. The Summit will bring together luminary researchers in computing for health, sustainability, human-centered AI, and tech policy to lay out the frontiers of these critical fields, and to plot out how they must evolve to meet the pace at which technology is progressing. The Doctoral Consortium at the Summit seeks to provide development opportunities for junior scientists pursuing a PhD in responsible computing, human-AI interaction, AI policy, AI safety, trustworthy AI, or other associated areas. Doctoral students will receive one-on-one and small-group mentorship and participate in activities to develop skills necessary to become successful scientists. Students will also be able to present their work to the wider community of participants to get additional feedback, experience presenting, and exposure for their work. Helping students with financial need attend the Doctoral Consortium will help establish a cohort of junior scientists who seek to study socially critical topics around the adoption of AI-based tools. These include, but are not limited to, responsible development and deployment of AI systems, human-AI interaction, AI policy and governance, trustworthy AI, and AI systems designed to operate safely around people. Because responsible AI problems often require expertise from multiple disciplines, a key goal of the doctoral consortium is to bring together students and mentors from a wide range of fields related to responsible AI, supporting connections and future collaborations in the area. Together, the travel grants will have broader impacts with regard to career preparation in areas of research that may deliver better designed, more responsibly designed, safer, and more trustworthy AI systems. 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.