Eric Stokan receives USM professorship to promote AI equity for students and faculty
UMBC Professor Eric Stokan, director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship, has been awarded the Elkins Professorship for Academic Transformation to address the significant barrier that prevents many in the social sciences from using powerful tools like AI and open-source software. Although these technologies have revolutionary potential, they often require advanced skills or expensive software, limiting their impact.
Stokan's work, supported by the University System of Maryland award, aims to bridge this gap by creating scalable, modular training in computational social science and generative AI, making the tools more accessible for faculty and students in teaching, research, and public impact projects.
The funding also supports the design and implementation of
five hands-on training modules and workshops tailored for faculty, students, and community organizations. Participants will learn to use generative AI systems like ChatGPT with simple programs written in
R. The goal is to help them answer novel and important research questions, develop marketable technical skills, work more effectively with data, and better communicate the results of their analyses with the broader community.
UMBC's Center for Social Science Scholarship will hold a workshop series this Fall on generative AI, LLMs, and computational social science methods. This series will begin with the basics of computing in R and how to use generative AI/LLMs in social science research workflows. Each session will focus on helping faculty and students become comfortable with deploying AI and LLM models in their research, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the ethical, equity, and environmental implications of these models.
This series is supported through the Elkins Professorship, features several speakers, and will continue into the spring 2026 semester. The four sessions this Fall are:
- Introduction to R, R Projects, R Markdown, and the Basics of LLMs, Dr. Eric Stokan, 12-1:30 pm, October 3, in PUP 451,
- Inductive Analysis of Texts with Embeddings, Dr. Dustin Stoltz (Lehigh University), 12-1:30 pm, November 5, Commons 329
- Dealing with unstructured data (text, images), APIs, and API calls to LLMs, Dr. Eric Stokan, 12-1:30pm, November 7, PUP 451
- Prompt-engineering and Fine-tuning in R, Dr. Eric Stokan, 12-1:30pm, December 12, PUP 451
Register for the sessions here.
Cosponsored by DoIT, the Center for Scalable Data and Computational Science, and CGC-SCIPE.
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UMBC's Center for Social Science Scholarship will hold a workshop series this Fall on generative AI, LLMs, and computational social science methods. This series will begin with the basics of...
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