The Behavioral Intervention Research Infrastructure (BIRI) is a state-of-the-art educational research infrastructure for conducting learning engineering to study and refine affect-aware behavioral
science interventions in higher education at scale. The project started in 2021 and is led by Dr. Rene Kizilcec and Dr. Ryan Baker, in collaboration with the Realizeit adaptive learning platform.

BIRI is a socio-technical infrastructure that enables substantial numbers of researchers to conduct large-scale randomized controlled trials of behavioral science interventions in the context of gateway college courses across large colleges and universities. BIRI provides researchers with real-time contextual information about students, to advance research into personalized and targeted interventions. BIRI enables researchers to specify variables on which to experiment with intervention, including intervention design, dosage, timing, and learner affect. Researchers are able to investigate the results of their experiments in terms of student course success, engagement and affect. They also can analyze experimental effects both overall (across all students in the study) and for specific sub-populations of students, a particularly important step given that some interventions (such as stereotype threat interventions) are designed for specific sub-populations.

The BIRI project is supported by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that bets early on exceptional people making the world better.