SBIR Phase I: Thinkquery: Empowering People to Thrive in a Complex World

Award ID: 2335521

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project empowers individuals with enhanced cognitive skills essential for success and innovation in the modern world. In today's global economy, the ability to think critically and creatively is crucial, but many people face developmental hurdles that hinder their economic competitiveness. Unlike existing cognitive tools, this innovation offers a user-friendly, chat-based approach that leverages each individual's language skills to cultivate transferable thinking abilities. The solution guides users through a systematic problem-solving process, helping them map their mental models, fostering metacognition, and enabling them to challenge assumptions and biases. Ultimately, the technology equips users to better comprehend and address a wide range of challenges. This project's primary aim is to support the diverse and underserved populations enrolled in community colleges. The technology enables students to learn at their own pace, break down developmental courses into shorter modules, and tailor content to align with their specific career aspirations. This adaptability and accessibility have the potential to transform education, providing a flexible and effective learning tool for a wide audience. The team addresses a pressing societal need for improved cognitive skills, enhancing not only individual prospects but also contributing to the nation's economic vitality. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on enabling individuals to effectively navigate complex challenges in the 21st century by leveraging the Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives (DSRP) Theory within a machine-interpretable data structure integrated into a visual-structural recommender system. The technical objective is to empower users with a tool that facilitates in-depth exploration and understanding of various problems and topics. The project's key components develop algorithms that incorporate DSRP theory and Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) techniques to create collaborative filtering and content-based filtering for generating user-specific questions. The solution creates a comprehensive reporting schema, coding, and statistical tools to validate empirical measures for different usage scenarios. The team also defines use case conditions and user experience design parameters to enhance the effectiveness of the technology. Initially, this project targets diverse, underserved, and disadvantaged students in developmental education programs who often struggle with college-level coursework. The innovation's accessibility, driven by the use of everyday language as inputs, makes it a commercially viable cognitive skills training technology with reduced friction and greater user-friendliness compared to existing solutions. The technology addresses both technical challenges and educational barriers associated with mind-mapping technologies, promising a significant impact on learning and problem-solving capabilities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Lindsay Portnoy