SOU computer scientist receives Sloan grant for “tacit knowledge” research

(Ashland, Ore.) - Bernadette Boscoe, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Southern Oregon University, recognizes a shared need in fields as dissimilar as astronomy, environmental science and violin acoustics, and a new grant will pay for research that may benefit those and other academic disciplines.

Boscoe has received a $250,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that will fund her study of tacit knowledge in research settings - gathering, storing and retrieving the unspoken practices of academic teams that sometimes are lost when a project is disrupted or ends. She will use a Large Language Model (LLM) of artificial intelligence to archive the protocols of scientific groups researching environmental science at SOU, astronomy at UCLA and violin acoustics at Cornell University.

"When students, postdocs, researchers or even professors leave a project or lab, much of the tacit, hands-on training practices are lost, because they are not documented," Boscoe said. "With the rapid advances of LLMs in AI, we now have more computational capabilities to keep track of tacit knowledge, as well as query it in a natural language form."

She said that mentorships are the main training method to transfer knowledge within most academic research groups - professors and researchers onboard new members to their groups, and train them to do research.

"AI can be used to have researchers rethink how they onboard newcomers, and consider how important tacit knowledge is in continuing collaborations and research over time," Boscoe said.

She is using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), an AI framework that pairs an LLM with an information retrieval system to improve accuracy and relevance of resulting data. She is working with SOU computer science graduate Chandler Campbell to build the project's RAG-LLM tool, called AquiLLM - named after the constellation Aquila.

Boscoe is a computer and information scientist who builds and researches infrastructures and tools to help domain scientists do their work. She earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York, an associate degree in computer science from Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania, a master's degree in mathematics from California State University-Northridge, and a Ph.D. in information science from UCLA.

The research that will be funded over the next year by the Sloan Foundation grant is an extension of her previous work, with the addition of artificial intelligence frameworks.

The grant will fund the development of AquiLLM tools to be used at SOU, UCLA and Cornell, so that each research team can store and query its own tacit knowledge over time. It will also provide funding to students who are participating in the research projects at the three universities.

The Sloan Foundation is a not-for-profit, mission-driven, grant-making institution dedicated to improving the welfare of all through the advancement of scientific knowledge. It was established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of the General Motors Corporation. It provides grants in four broad areas: direct support of research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics; initiatives to increase the quality, equity, diversity and inclusiveness of scientific institutions and the science workforce; projects to develop or leverage technology to empower research; and efforts to enhance and deepen public engagement with science and scientists.

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