As artificial intelligence continues to reshape nearly every aspect of society, five McGill research projects are receiving support to explore its opportunities, risks, and real-world applications through interdisciplinary research. The Computational and Data Systems Institute (CDSI) is thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2026 Interdisciplinary Research Development (IRD) Awards. Congratulations to PIs Jocelyn Maclure, Vera Békés, Maria Cutumisu, Amin Emad, and Faleh Tamimi (clockwise from top left)!
Awarded through the McGill Collaborative for AI and Society (McCAIS), CDSI’s flagship strategic initiative, the IRD Awards support interdisciplinary research that seeks to better understand and positively shape the impact of artificial intelligence on society. Funded projects span a range of fields, including the arts, decision-making, health, law and public policy.
Modelled on CDSI’s Convergent Research Themes (CRT) Program, the IRD Awards provide seed funding for projects at various stages of development that examine the societal implications and potential benefits of AI through an interdisciplinary lens. The Exploratory Stream supports newly formed teams in investigating innovative cross-disciplinary research ideas and assessing their feasibility. The Proof-of-Concept Stream, meanwhile, enables more established teams to advance promising interdisciplinary research toward the next stage of development.
Please join us in congratulating this year’s awardees—we look forward to seeing how their research contributes to a better understanding of AI’s role in society and helps unlock new opportunities for positive impact. For a more in-depth description of each project, click here.
2026 Exploratory IRD Awards
Vera Békés (Associate Professor, Educational and Counselling Psychology)
Reducing AI overreliance in mental health care
Professor Békés' study aims to identify factors driving clinician overreliance on AI in mental health care and test interventions to promote responsible AI-assisted decision-making.
Maria Cutumisu (Associate Professor, Educational and Counselling Psychology)
Leveraging Large Language Models to Detect At-Risk Individuals in Education and Health Sciences
Professor Cutumisu's interdisciplinary project leverages large language models to detect early linguistic indicators of academic and health risks, enabling ethical, transparent, and human‑guided interventions across education and healthcare contexts.
Jocelyn Maclure (Professor, Philosophy; Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in Human Nature and Technology)
Epistemic Dependence, Value Alignment and Freedom of Speech in the Digital Public Sphere
Professor Maclure's project aims to identify clear guidelines to regulate the diffusion of mis- and disinformation online, all the while respecting the individual right to freedom of speech.
Faleh Tamimi (Professor and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Education, Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences)
AI-Assisted Quality Assessment in Systematic Reviews
The primary goal of Professor Tamimi's research is to develop an AI designed to assess the quality of the medical literature
2026 Proof-of-Concept IRD Awards
Amin Emad (Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Improving precision medicine through generative AI: a use case in lung cancer marker identification
In this project, Professor Emad and his team propose a counterfactual-based generative AI model to investigate the molecular mechanisms driving lung cancer at the patient-specific level.
