Faculty and students from the School of Engineering, in collaboration with the Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Research (SVPR), have been busy creating AI-powered platforms to enhance our connections on campus. Gregorio Toscano, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, predicts that AI will change the face of our culture in ways similar to the advent of the automobile at the turn of the 20th century. He and his team have been working on three AI-powered platform tools to assist with everything from research grants to course credits to scheduling classes.
The first portal to be revealed is called IgniteHub. This is a centralized research management tool that facilitates faculty networking and collaborations, identifies new extramural funding opportunities, serves as a platform for both intramural and extramural grant competitions, and helps manage grants that are obtained. Faculty will be able to edit proposals, objectives, and progress reports, while at the same time, the Research office can centralize submission of proposals and progress reports to funding entities. Like most AI tools, this will become more robust the more interactions it is fed, finding more collaborative opportunities for teams of faculty and students and discovering funding opportunities available from foundations, government agencies, and philanthropic resources.
IgniteHub is being released May 30, 2025 for faculty to apply for seed grants from The Catholic University of America Innovation Fund. Subsequently, IgniteHub can be used by faculty as the portal for research proposals for extramural funding. The Innovation Fund is a philanthropically generated fund managed through the SVPR office that supports these portals. Using IgniteHub, faculty can apply and compete for funding to pursue new research initiatives, build pilot or proof-of-principle data, or prototypes that can then be used to generate extramural funding.
After this initial release, the team will complete two other key portals for University-wide use. The first will assist faculty with academic advising, and the second will help optimize class scheduling and curriculum management. These services are currently in development, and release dates will be announced in the near future.
