At the center of Professor Shani Daily’s research is a question extending beyond technology itself: How can institutions and technologies be designed to help more people thrive?
Seeking answers to that question through scholarship resulted in Daily becoming one of the first of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s faculty preeminent hires—a university-wide initiative to continue building UT’s top-tier research through groundbreaking innovation and discovery. She is joining the College of Communication and Information’s School of Information Sciences, bringing with her an interdisciplinary research background focused on the intersection of technology, learning, and human experience.
Coming from Duke University, Daily’s work explores how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and affective computing, can be designed alongside educational programs and communities to help students thrive in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). She works directly with communities and uses a variety of research methods to develop technologies and educational environments that support learning, personal growth, and long-term student achievement.
As she settles into her new role at UT, Daily’s ever-inquisitive mind has new questions that continue the overarching theme of her research, such as:
- How can families in Tennessee can become active participants in constructing the future through entrepreneurship?
- How can technology support whole-person development?
- And what systemic changes are necessary for more students to persist in STEM disciplines?
She is particularly interested in the role the arts can play in opening new pathways into STEM, and in the possibilities and challenges presented by technologies that can sense human emotion.
“What does it mean for a machine to sense how a person feels, and who decides what it does with that information?” Daily said.
That question becomes increasingly important as artificial intelligence develops rapidly, such as the growth of multimodal and affective AI, a progression Daily has been watching closely. This AI tech can interpret information such as tone, facial expressions, and physiological signals. She believes the capabilities of these technologies are advancing faster than the social and ethical norms surrounding them, and that information scientists need to be part of those conversations from the beginning.
She is also interested in edge computing, in which AI systems operate on devices closer to users rather than relying entirely on distant data centers. Through her role as education and workforce director of the Athena AI Institute, Daily became interested in how this approach can create different possibilities for privacy and access, particularly in rural communities.
Another area she sees as critical is AI literacy.
“Public and school libraries are already where people go to make sense of new technology, and I think that’s one of the most underused assets in this country,” she said
Creating More Paths to Success
Daily’s interest in systemic change is deeply personal. Throughout her own education and career, she encountered institutions that were not necessarily designed with someone like her in mind.
She recalls being a student without prior computing experience who was nevertheless expected to build and create early in her education. She remembers being a dancer who was not always perceived as a serious student and later becoming a graduate student with children. She persisted, but those experiences made her interested in the difference between simply making it through an institution and actually having the opportunity to thrive.
That distinction has become central to her research.
Daily’s daughter once illustrated her mother’s research by drawing a wide group of students entering an institution, followed by a single narrow path through it. Some students make it to the other side because they happen to fit the institution’s expectations; some make it through while carrying harm, while others are lost along the way.
For Daily, the illustration captured the larger problem her research seeks to address.
“When only a narrow band of people makes it through, you end up with a narrow band of perspectives shaping the practices, the policies, and the technology everyone else has to live with,” she said. “We are watching the consequences of that in AI right now, in real time.”
Ultimately, Daily hopes her work will lead to lasting institutional change—changes that remain after a research project or partnership has ended. While publications remain an important part of her work, she measures impact more broadly.
“The impact I want isn’t primarily a publication count,” she said. “It’s institutions that have changed how they operate in ways that outlast my involvement, and people who go on to build things I never would have thought of.”
Building at UT
For the Nashville-born Daily, joining UT is more than the beginning of a new professional chapter—it is, in some ways, a return home. Her path to information sciences was not a straight line. As a child, she was constantly building and creating. She participated in gymnastics before a knee injury led her to dance and cheer, but her curiosity about how things work remained. When it came time for college, she pursued a bachelor’s electrical engineering at Florida State University, a decision she made before discovering the field of information sciences.
“I spent a career discovering that my real questions were about people, institutions, and their intersections with technology, rather than only circuits,” Daily said. “Information sciences turned out to be the field that was already asking [those questions]. Joining a school of information sciences feels less like a change of direction than finally standing in the right building.”
After earning her bachelor’s, Daily pursued a master’s degree from Florida A&M University followed by a second master’s degree and a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. Her work at MIT established the foundation for the research she continues today, examining how technology and educational environments can create more pathways for students to engage, persist, and succeed in STEM.
At UT, Daily sees significant opportunities to pursue that work through collaboration across disciplines and throughout the state, and is eager to make connections with the AI Tennessee Initiative; the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture; Tickle College of Engineering; the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and UT’s extension campuses.
Her arrival also comes at a time when UT is intentionally expanding its research expertise and investing in interdisciplinary collaboration. Daily said the opportunity to contribute to that momentum was appealing, but she emphasized that the existing strength at CCI was equally important in her decision to join the university.
“A huge part of what attracted me here was the stellar faculty that are doing incredible work here,” she said. “The opportunities for collaboration and innovation are endless, and that will make a difference for the impact I can make here.”
From Research to the Classroom
She is especially excited about teaching programming applications through Programming for Information Applications and exploring courses that allow students to build something tangible for a real person or community. Human-centered design and human-centered computing are natural fits for her teaching, and she is also interested in teaching affective computing.
Her approach to teaching is rooted in the constructionist tradition she encountered at MIT: People learn best when they are making things they care about and sharing those creations with others.
That philosophy also shapes what she wants her students to bring into the classroom.
“A professor once told my class that he’d had no life while he was in college, so we shouldn’t either,” Daily said. “I don’t believe having a life outside your major makes you less serious about it. I want students bringing their fullest selves into my classroom, because that’s where their best work comes from.”
For Daily, the opportunity to return to Tennessee adds another layer to her arrival at UT. She described coming to Knoxville as a homecoming she did not expect to have, and she sees the university’s role as a land-grant institution as particularly meaningful.
“UT has an obligation to the entire state,” she said. “The School of Information Sciences holds trusted relationships in Tennessee communities that most research programs would need decades to build. A school that defines itself by service is a school where my kind of research makes sense.”
As she begins her time on Rocky Top, Daily is resisting the temptation to arrive with predetermined answers. Instead, she plans to spend time listening and learning from her new colleagues and communities.
“I don’t want to arrive with solutions for a place I haven’t gotten to know,” she said. “So I want real time with colleagues across the university.”
That spirit of curiosity has followed Daily throughout her career—from the child who was always building something, to the engineering student who discovered that her most important questions were about people, to the researcher now exploring how technology can help create more inclusive pathways into the future.
And in returning to the state where her own story began, she sees an opportunity to help Tennessee shape what comes next.