Kaiping Chen, associate professor of life sciences communication, has received a Gemini Academic Program Award. The award is part of a Google program that selects academic labs to receive credits to support their work. The support enables higher throughput for scientific experiments and promotes research.

Chen was awarded $10,000 and will use the funds to advance her computational social science research on high-stakes human behavior using multimodal AI. Her work will range from designing conversational AI systems that help people engage more thoughtfully across socially divisive issues to evaluating how vision-and-language AI models interpret risk in complex real-world scenes such as protest footage.

Chen will also be the speaker for the upcoming Google Cloud Research Day on Feb. 26 at UW–Madison where she will share more of her work.