Research Council Awards $42,000 in Grants to Support Faculty Projects
From artificial intelligence (AI) and original artwork to French cinema and the roots of national identity, the latest round of research grants, totaling $42,000, from the Bentley Research Council (BRC) showcases the depth and breadth of faculty scholarship.
“Research is more than an academic pursuit — it’s a catalyst for cultural, technological and social transformation,” says BRC chair Marco Marabelli, professor of Computer Information Systems (CIS) and associate director of Bentley’s Hoffman Center for Business Ethics. “This year’s projects reflect the BRC’s commitment to supporting academic and creative endeavors that not only advance knowledge within the campus community but also help shape the conversations that define our world.”
Read on to learn more about the BRC-funded faculty members and their wide-ranging projects.
Assistant Professor, CIS
Project: “Large Language Models for Improving Generalizability and Adaptability of Explainable AI Models”
As AI tools become more prevalent in the business world — according to one recent report, 78% percent of companies worldwide use AI for at least one business function — consumers and shareholders alike are demanding greater transparency and accountability. Researchers in the emerging field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) are actively addressing this concern by developing AI models that provide clear explanations of their decision-making processes.
Aljanaideh is one of them. His current focus is generalizability, or an AI model’s ability to perform reliably when encountering new and diverse data sets. Through his BRC-supported study, he’s using large language models (LLMs), machine learning clustering and classification algorithms to identify opportunities for automating AI analysis.
“Reducing manual intervention will make XAI more accessible across a wider range of tasks and domains,” Aljanaideh explains. “This will promote broader adoption by practitioners in fields where transparency is critical, such as health care and finance.” Ultimately, he hopes his research can “open doors for strategic collaboration with academic and industry partners, ensuring that Bentley will emerge as a key contributor to responsible AI adoption.”
Associate Professor, Modern Languages
Project: “Indexing and Image Subvention for French Edition of Single-Author Scholarly Monograph, The Ethnographic Optic”
Astourian’s first book, 2024’s The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema, examines how both fictional and documentary films produced in France after World War II reflect a national identity shaped by the dissolution of the country’s colonial empire. Focusing on three filmmakers “known in the late ’50s for their sophisticated depictions of ‘the other,’” she explains, the book “examines the moment when urban French elites turned their ethnographic gaze away from their colonies and onto their own society.”
With the BRC’s support, Astourian is developing a French language edition, making her book available to French-speaking scholars and academic institutions, who, she says, don’t engage as extensively with English-based sources. Astourian hopes the book will also appeal to non-academic audiences and ultimately “contribute to nuanced conversations about French cinema in relation to unequal colonial hierarchies.”
Professor, English and Media Studies
Project: “Reshaping”
This fall, Hayward will spend his sabbatical as an artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA). During his residency, he’ll be working on a new photo-documentary project, “Reshaping,” that will call attention to the growing impacts of climate change on Boston and surrounding areas.
BRC funding will enable Hayward to explore new production methods — including encaustic (wax-based) painting and cyanotype (camera-less photography) — and produce original photo-sculptural works. His goals for the exhibition are to showcase how “landmarks and cultural touchstones will be irreparably transformed” by sea-level rise, extreme heat and other climate change effects, and to emphasize how global warming disproportionately affects underserved communities.
Assistant Professor, Sociology
Project: “Colonial Pedagogy, Race and Ethnicity in the Middle East with a Focus on Iran”
In his latest research, Mohammadpour examines how Persian-Shi‘i nationalism shaped Iran’s educational system, rendering it a tool of cultural erasure and assimilation. “Although Iran was never colonized by European powers, it has long-internalized colonial structures,” he explains. “Similar to North America, where schooling has often silenced Indigenous histories and languages, Iran’s educational institutions have served as tools to craft a dominant national identity at the expense of the country’s diverse ethnic and linguistic communities, including Arabs, Baloches and Kurds.”
With the BRC’s support, Mohammadpour will draw on interviews, archival research and textbook analysis to illuminate how Iran’s educational system was reformed to legitimize state control. He hopes his research will “deepen our understanding of how race, language and education intersect beyond Euro-American contexts and lead to broader conversations about colonialism, racial justice and state violence.” He is also developing a new course around these themes that will foster critical thinking about global inequality and “prepare Bentley students to address complex social issues in a connected world.”
Lecturer in History
Project: “Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in the Post-Reconstruction U.S.”
Funding from the BRC will help Ortiz-Castro conduct research to complete the final chapters of his first book, Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in the Post-Reconstruction U.S. An interdisciplinary history of citizenship and the life sciences in America, the book explores the ideological foundations of post-Civil War national culture.
“So much of American history has been driven by the question of who ‘belongs,’” Ortiz-Castro explains. “My work bridges the history of Reconstruction and the history of science and eugenics, establishing the boundaries of national belonging that are still being debated today.” He hopes his findings — which will inform a Bentley course on the history of citizenship he’ll be teaching this spring — can “extend the ways in which scholars can and should think about the place of science in the space of the everyday.”
Assistant Professor, Natural and Applied Sciences
Project: “Exploring Trauma and PTSD Risk in Kenya and Uganda: Mixed Methods Analyses from the GPAA & NeuroGAP Studies”
A social and psychiatric epidemiologist, Scoglio is primarily interested in the effects of violence and trauma. Her latest research, which is supported by the BRC and undertaken with Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where Scoglio is a visiting scientist, aims to provide a more definitive understanding of trauma exposure and associated PTSD severity, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from the experiences of more than 3,500 study participants in Kenya and Uganda.
“There is a high burden of trauma exposure and PTSD in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in East Africa,” Scoglio says. “However, much of the research on trauma has relied on Western checklists and models that may not capture culturally relevant traumatic events in non-Western settings.” Ultimately, she hopes her findings will “support the development of more culturally appropriate trauma tools and improve our understanding of PTSD risk in underrepresented global populations.”
Assistant Professor, CIS
Project: “Investigating Instructor Credibility and Learner Engagement in MOOCs”
Introduced in 2008, massive open online courses (MOOCs) — free, web-based educational programs that accommodate unlimited participants — have transformed higher education. Yet, despite their accessibility and affordability, MOOCs typically have low completion rates.
To help understand why, Xu is exploring how visual and linguistic cues influence learner engagement. Supported by the BRC, she is conducting a review of 3,000 courses offered by Udemy, a San Francisco-based MOOC provider. After extracting images and transcribing videos from each course, she’ll use GPT-4 Omni to identify and quantify indicators of instructor credibility, such as presence, tone and language style. She’ll then determine how these credibility signals correlate with learner engagement outcomes such as course ratings, reviews and enrollments.
Xu believes her study results will provide practical insights for instructional design and platform optimization in digital education. She also hopes her findings “will highlight Bentley’s role in advancing the study of online learning environments, which are increasingly important in both academic and professional settings.”
Associate Professor, Accounting
Project: “Impact of Subjective Performance Evaluation on AI Adoption”
As companies race to integrate generative AI into everyday tasks, could gender differences in adopting the technology negatively impact how women are perceived in the workplace? It’s a question Zhou hopes to answer through her BRC-supported study.
“Prior research shows that female employees’ good performance is more likely to be attributed to external and unstable factors, such as effort and luck, than to internal and stable factors, such as abilities and skills, compared with male employees,” she says. Against this historical backdrop, and in light of research indicating women are more skeptical of AI than men, Zhou says gender differences in AI use could result in “male employees being evaluated more positively than female employees.”
Her study will analyze the extent to which female versus male employees use AI to complete workplace tasks and will assess how managers evaluate the performance of these employees when gender is manipulated. In addition to contributing to existing research on gender bias in the workplace, Zhou hopes her study will inform “the interplay of AI technologies and management control systems, providing valuable insights into optimizing AI integration and promoting effective decision-making practices.”