Undergraduate Research, Innovative, and Creative Activities (URiCA) Program Artificial Intelligence (AI) Usage (Policy #736)

The policy is established to guide students and mentors on the proper use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for proposal submissions and work presented at URiCA Symposium events. 

Office of the Provost

The policy primarily affects students because work completed through the URiCA Program should be their own. However, faculty and staff mentors are also impacted.

GenAI: Generative Artificial Intelligence is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new and original content.

Intellectual Property Rights: Legal protection for individuals’ creations of the mind.

URiCA: The Undergraduate Research, Innovative, and Creative Activities Program funds student projects across all disciplines at UW-Whitewater.

The Undergraduate Research, Innovative, and Creative (URiCA) Program at UW-Whitewater recognizes that the field of Artificial Intelligence is evolving quickly. URiCA recognizes that students and mentors might have questions about its use when preparing proposals, conducting funded research, and submitting reports to URiCA. Students and mentors are responsible for how they utilize any Generative AI during these activities. Since the URiCA program covers multiple disciplines, students and mentors should also adhere to discipline-specific AI usage policies established by professional organizations as standards.

Other considerations students and mentors should reflect on:

• Understand the relationship between GenAI and Intellectual Property Rights.
• In most research fields, reproducibility and transparency are essential for ethical research, and GenAI tools should not weaken that standard.
• Students and mentors should understand the limitations of GenAI and acknowledge that some tools will sometimes produce "hallucinations."
• When sharing your results, be ready to answer follow-up questions about all aspects of the research.
• Policies of external publications, organizations, and conferences where the work may be submitted or presented, in addition to URiCA-sponsored events.

The University of Wisconsin - Whitewater has a responsibility to promote academic honesty and integrity, as well as to develop proper procedures for handling cases of academic dishonesty. Students are accountable for doing their work honestly, accurately representing it, citing sources correctly, and respecting the academic efforts of others. More information can be found at UWS Chapter 14 Student Academic Disciplinary Procedures.

When submitting any proposal for our grant competitions or abstracts to present your research at our sponsored events, you must disclose AI usage in your application or submission. You must include the following:

1. The name of the Generative AI system.
2. The strategy used (e.g., editing grammar, translating transcripts from your non-native language to your native language, generating ideas, etc.).
3. Prompts used.
4. A list of sections that include AI-generated content.

UWS Chapter 14 Student Academic Disciplinary Procedures

Original Issuance Date: May 14, 2026

May 2031

Questions regarding the interpretation of this policy should be directed to:

John Frye

Director, URiCA Program

Telephone: 262-472-1268

Email: fryej@uww.edu