Competitive Research Grants and Funds

Successful researchers need ability, grit, a dash of luck and a plentiful supply of funds. I have grit and have recently been rather successful at drawing down funding. Ability and luck, however, are still in short supply.

Current Funding

Funds received and grants awarded are listed in reverse chronological order.

1. 2026–2028 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – Toward an AI-Compatible Curriculum: Constructive Integration of LLMs into Programming Education (three-year grant)
2. 2026–2028 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – Visualizing Language Features and Feedback using Intelligent CALL for L1 and L2 Language Learners (three-year grant)
3. 2025–2027 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – BAXRLL - Biosignal Adaptive XR for Language Learning (three-year grant)
4. 2023–2026 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – A Computerized Diagnostic Language Assessment of Japanese EFL Learners' Spoken Requesting (three-year grant)

Previous Recent Funding

1. 2025 Competitive research fund (Principal Investigator) – Development of a genre-sensitive bigram frequency index to support explainable forensic authorship analysis (one-year grant)
2. 2025 Competitive research fund (Co-Investigator) – Flexy Planner: Modeling Smart Reminders for Handling Non-critical, Deferred, or Weakly Planned Activities (one-year grant)
3. 2023–2025 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – Theory, Methodology and Tools for Tailoring CAPT Feedback (three-year grant)
4. 2023–2025 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – Dynamic Genre-Specific Automated Online Feedback Tool (three-year grant)
5. 2024 Publication Encouragement Fund – Open Access fee for Q1 Journal, IEEE Access (one-time grant)
6. 2024 Competitive research fund (Principal Investigator) – Automatic detection of AI-generated student texts using linguistic-led explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) (one-year grant)
7. 2024 Competitive research fund (Co-Investigator) – Enhancing musicology analysis with computational and Large Language Models in scope of digital humanity paradigm (one-year grant)
8. 2022–2024 JSPS kakenhi (Principal Investigator) – Natural language generation of trend descriptions for pedagogic purposes (three-year grant) [kaken]
9. 2021–2022 Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics (Principal Investigator) – Proof-of-concept software to detect computer-generated papers (one-year grant)
10. 2020–2022 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – Cross-disciplinary approach to prosody-based automatic speech processing and its application to computer-assisted language teaching (three-year grant) [kaken]
11. 2020–2022 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – Preparing computer science students for job interviews with English video production and analysis (three-year grant) [kaken]
12. 2021 Competitive research fund (Principal Investigator) – Describing graphs: Scaffolding learners through text generation (one-year grant)
13. 2020 Competitive research fund (Principal Investigator) – Online language feature detector (one-year grant)
14. 2019–2021 JSPS kakenhi (Principal Investigator) – Feature visualizer and detector for scientific texts (three-year grant extended by one year) [kaken]
15. 2019–2021 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – Developing a diagnostic language assessment of Japanese EFL learners' English language email writing (three-year grant extended by one year) [kaken]
16. 2019–2021 JSPS kakenhi (Co-Investigator) – 役割語分析で英語のアカデミックライティングスキル向上を目指す地域貢献型PBL (Improving academic writing through role language) (three-year grant extended by one year) [kaken]
17. 2019 Competitive research fund (Principal Investigator) – Tense Activator: Automatic identification and explanation of tense in context (one-year grant)
18. 2019 Competitive research fund (Co-Investigator) – Speech prosody modeling, visualization and estimation in an interdisciplinary discourse (one-year grant)
19. 2019 Competitive research fund (Co-Investigator) – Professional communicative writing and pragmatics: Addressing the needs of University of Aizu students (one-year grant)
20. 2018 Competitive research fund (Principal Investigator) – Interactive language feature visualizer for thesis writing (one-year grant)
21. 2017 Competitive research fund (Principal Investigator) – Online error detection and feedback tool for graduate theses (one-year grant)
22. 2017 Competitive research fund (Co-Investigator) – Graduation thesis and presentation development through student-produced video (one-year grant)
23. 2017 Strategic research fund (Co-Investigator) – Project-based language learning: A model for Fukushima revitalization (one-year grant)

Funding Organisations

This page provides details of funding received since 2017. I have successfully written or co-written grant and funding applications for JSPS Kakenhi Grants-in-aid for Scientific Research, University of Aizu Competitive Research Fund, and the University of Aizu Strategic Research Fund.

1. JSPS Kakenhi Grants-in-aid

Grants-in-aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi) are multi-year research grants awarded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The grants are awarded based on a stringent peer-review screening process. The overall acceptance rate of proposals is approximately 25%.

2. UoA Competitive Research Fund

The University of Aizu Competitive Research Fund awards single-year research grants on the basis of a written proposal and formal presentation given to the review board.

3. UoA Publication Encouragement Fund

The University of Aizu Publication Encouragement Fund awards one-time research grants to enable open-access publication in approved top-tier venues.

4. UoA Strategic Research Fund

The strategic research fund was a single-year grant offered only in 2017. The criteria for allocation were similar to the UoA Competitive Research Fund.

5. Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics

The Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics (AIFL) is a research institute within Aston University in the United Kingdom. AIFL grants are competitive and awards are based on peer-review. This grant is for one year.