Graduate students across campus are constantly engaged in work benefitting the state, nation, and world. One program at UW–Madison has helped to connect motivated students and community partners to pursue projects together with positive outcomes for all involved.
PhD student Yaxuan Yin participated in the UniverCity Alliance Scholars Program in fall 2024. The program supports communities in Wisconsin with projects that require specialized skills such as research or data analysis, matching those communities with UW–Madison graduate and undergraduate students who can bring those skills to bear.
Yin is a fourth-year student in the Information School. She matched with Iowa County, which sought to better understand how its workers want to use artificial intelligence (AI) in their work.
Yin’s research on human-computer interactions stood out to those at Iowa County who were looking to partner with a UW–Madison student. The project was equally appealing for her. Not only did it complement her research focus, but it also gave her the chance to interview government workers, who are a population Yin said she had not previously heard from in her work.
Yin conducted interviews with department leaders and government workers in the county. She found that only a small proportion of them had used AI in their daily lives. Some may not know AI’s full capabilities, she said. Others were concerned that AI could not handle their complex responsibilities.
“They don’t really trust the ability of AI in doing their work, because that’s their domain and area,” Yin said, adding that one challenge contributing to this is a lack of guidance on AI tools. “They cannot fully embrace AI because they don’t know what the boundary is there.”
Yin used what she learned from the interviews to draft a guide to AI tools to help people in Iowa County use them effectively. Yin said the considerations for this document included the risks of using AI, tips for using the tools to get the outcome one wants, and guidance on when AI is suited for a task.
For example, Yin said AI is good at drafting a working plan or proposal but not generating an idea. Distinguishing these uses for AI can help employees be aware of which of their projects can incorporate AI tools.
“We hope there’s a system that can be customized for the government context overall [to] better promote the human and AI collaboration – so, utilize the employee’s judgment but AI’s ability to make the work overall more efficient,” Yin said.
Ellen Tyler, Senior Community Resiliency Planner at the Southwestern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission and Yin’s mentor through the UniverCity Alliance Scholars Program, said Yin captured the results of the interviews she conducted in a way that will continue to be useful for the county.
“Iowa County hopes to leverage generative AI to improve operations, but without a policy in place, employees are uncertain of acceptable use and therefore, many employees have avoided use,” Tyler said. “This policy will allow the county to continue evolving with technology and equip employees with guidelines for acceptable use of generative AI in their county work.”
Tyler also noted that Yin was a pleasure to work with on this project.
“She is thoughtful, hardworking, and adaptable,” Tyler said. “Beyond this, she has expertise in AI and a natural curiosity.”
For her part, Yin feels that working on this project helped her to expand the scope of her own work. Her thesis research explores the disparities in online communities and knowledge generation, combining geography and online community exploration to look for patterns in the digital world. Currently, she’s investigating the impacts of broadband expansion on knowledge production for crowdsourced websites such as Wikipedia.
Yin said one benefit of being a UniverCity Alliance Scholar was the opportunity to build partnerships with government employees that could help her in future research projects.
“This project aligned with my research, but helped me know the needs from the government side,” she said. “Overall, the program helped us [as scholars] navigate different community-based issues.”
Learn more about the UniverCity Alliance Scholars Program. The program is accepting applications for the fall 2025 cohort of scholars now through April 4.