Helping students learn to evaluate AI. Making autonomous drones safer. Measuring how people express trust in AI. Helping local governments navigate AI policy. Understanding how to reestablish trust after AI failures.
Those are among the questions driving five new research projects selected for the fourth round of seed funding from the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS), a four-university consortium co-led by the University of Maryland and George Washington University. The institute has awarded just over $515,000 to multidisciplinary teams from UMD, GW, Morgan State University and Cornell University. The grants, ranging from $40,000 to $160,000, are designed to launch new collaborations, generate preliminary results and position investigators to compete for larger external funding.
Supported by a $20 million award from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, TRAILS brings together researchers with expertise in disciplines that include computer science, engineering, law, public policy and the social sciences. Collectively, they are examining one of AI’s biggest challenges: ensuring that AI -infused systems are not only technically advanced, but also trustworthy, accountable and aligned with society’s needs.
The latest round of seed projects spans participatory AI design, methods, sense-making and governance, exploring not only how AI systems work, but also how people use them, how institutions deploy them and how trust is built over time.
“TRAILS is uniquely positioned to connect AI innovation with governance, accountability and public trust at a national scale,” said Hal Daumé III, director of TRAILS and a professor of computer science at UMD. “Over the past few years, we've moved the conversation beyond model accuracy alone to examine how AI systems perform in real-world human, institutional and societal contexts.”
The five projects illustrate how that vision can be put into practice.
“We're continuing to transition from cutting-edge research and scholarship to research with significant impact,” said David Broniatowski, deputy director of TRAILS and a professor of engineering management and systems engineering at GW. “These projects are designed to grow beyond TRAILS through new partnerships and external support.”
Rebuilding Trust After AI Failures
Broniatowski and Cornell’s Valerie Reyna will investigate why people often respond differently to the same AI success or failure. Drawing on reports from the AI Incident Database, the team will examine how people’s values shape their perceptions of AI risks, responsibility and accountability, and whether meaningful explanations tailored to different worldviews are more effective than detailed technical information alone at rebuilding public trust.
Training the Next Public Health Workforce
Morgan State’s Robin Butler and Vishnu Kumar, together with UMD’s Hassanatu Blake, will study how participatory learning influences AI literacy and trust through developing a four-course Certificate in Responsible Public Health AI. Students will help design the curriculum alongside faculty and public health professionals, creating educational resources that emphasize explainability, fairness and accountability while preparing a more diverse workforce to responsibly deploy AI.
Reading Trust Through Language
UMD’s Julia Mendelsohn and Charlotte Vaughn will explore how trust in AI is expressed through everyday conversation. Using computational linguistics to analyze open-ended survey responses, the researchers will identify patterns in how people communicate confidence, uncertainty and concern about AI, creating new tools for measuring public trust across diverse communities.
Safer AI for Autonomous Drones
GW’s Nan Wu and Peng Wei will develop lightweight AI systems that enable autonomous drones to earn users’ trust by making safer predictions in unpredictable urban environments. The project will improve the reliability of vision-language models by reducing decision delays, strengthening performance under challenging conditions and validating the technology through high-fidelity simulations of hazards such as changing light, unexpected obstacles and other real-world conditions.
Helping Local Governments Govern AI
GW’s Joseph Dunne and UMD’s Katie Shilton and Jwan Khisro will examine how local governments translate broad AI principles into everyday practice. Through case studies in Maryland and Washington, D.C., the researchers will explore how public officials define trustworthy AI, incorporate public participation into implementation decisions and navigate accountability challenges, producing practical guidance for cities and counties nationwide adopting AI technologies.
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In addition to their academic home departments, Hal Daumé III, Julia Mendelsohn and Katie Shilton all have appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), which provides administrative and technical support for TRAILS.