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Alex Murray speaking at a research conference
Alex Murray presenting AI research findings
IF Lab members at the Midwest Blockchain Conference 2025
Blockchain research presentation at Midwest BCC 2025
IF Lab team collaborating at Midwest Blockchain Conference
Conference networking session at Midwest BCC 2025
IF Lab robot dog demonstration at University of Oregon
Students interacting with AI-powered robot dog
Robot dog AI research project at IF Lab

Highlighted Projects

Explore our research on AI governance agents, synthetic stakeholders, tokenized organizational knowledge, and AI as a co-founder in entrepreneurship.

AI Teaching Assistant
AI Teaching Assistant icon

AI Teaching Assistant

Students in large lecture halls often get stuck — too intimidated to ask questions in front of 300+ peers, unable to reach professors during office hours, and part of a volume of emails that overwhelms faculty. We built the first AI Teaching Assistants for students at the University of Oregon to solve this. The AI TA gives every student an always-available, course-specific resource that can answer questions instantly, at any hour. As of January 2026, over 2,000 students are actively using them.

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Building Governance Agents
Building Governance Agents icon

Building Governance Agents

The GoverNoun project explores the use of AI agents to revitalize decentralized governance within Nouns DAO. Acting as an administrative assistant, community resource, and voting representative, GoverNoun aims to address low participation and limited strategic direction in DAOs. It enhances governance processes, maintains institutional memory, and helps set a renewed political vision for decentralized communities through AI-powered insights and engagement.

Read on Medium →
Tokenizing Organizational Knowledge icon

Tokenizing Organizational Knowledge

In this project, we examine how organizations can recognize and reward human knowledge contributions as AI becomes embedded in organizational decision-making. As people increasingly work alongside AI systems, it is often unclear who deserves credit for ideas, insights, and improvements that emerge from human–AI collaboration. We develop a framework for transparent knowledge crediting in human–AI systems, proposing the use of combined AI and blockchain infrastructures to trace contributions across different types of tasks and knowledge. By clarifying how human insight adds value alongside AI, the research offers guidance for building intelligent organizations that support learning, fairness, and long-term performance.

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Developing Synthetic Stakeholders

In this project, we examine how emerging technologies can give voice to overlooked stakeholders such as the natural environment or future human generations. We introduce the concept of synthetic stakeholders, in which non-traditional stakeholders are formally recognized and represented by technological agents capable of acting and learning on their behalf. The framework, and ensuing lab experiments, show how organizations can more consistently and responsibly include these stakeholders in decision-making. The project highlights how technology can reshape governance and accountability in the face of long-term and complex societal challenges.

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Artificial Intelligence as a Co-founder icon

Artificial Intelligence as a Co-founder

In this project, we study how large language models (LLMs) shape entrepreneurial thinking. Participants were asked to design new ventures and describe why they believed their ideas would work, once independently and once with the help of an AI tool. By comparing these two experiences, we observe how AI changes the way people reason, connect ideas, and articulate cause-and-effect relationships. We find no significant improvement in idea generation with the assistance of LLMs on average. However, we find effects based on initial performance: participants who started with lower-quality unaided ideas show clear gains, whereas those who began with higher-quality ideas exhibit smaller or even negative effects.