Q&A: AI Plus Institute Director Balakrishnan 'Prabha' Prabhakaran
ALBANY, N.Y. (March 18, 2025) – In January, Balakrishnan “Prabha” Prabhakaran joined UAlbany as the first permanent director of the AI Plus Institute.
Prabhakaran, an expert in human computer interaction, previously spent 25 years on the computer science faculty at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he also served as associate vice president for research centers and institutes and director of the Multimedia Systems Laboratory.
In his lab in Texas, Prabhakaran and his students studied how new technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality and wearable biometric sensors could dramatically improve telemedicine for physical therapy and rehabilitation — incorporating a sense of touch using haptic technology and giving physicians much more detailed information about their patients’ strength and range of motion.
Prabhakaran grew up in the southern-most part of India, completing his PhD in computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras at Chennai, followed by post-doctoral research at the University of Maryland at College Park and three years in a tenure-track faculty position in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. He also served as a program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF).
At UAlbany, he’ll oversee the research agenda of UAlbany’s AI Plus initiative, helping sow interdisciplinary research collaborations among dozens of affiliated UAlbany faculty whose work intersects with artificial intelligence.
We caught up with Prabhakaran recently to talk to him about the frontiers of AI research, the importance of the federal government’s role and what he thinks people get wrong about AI.
What attracted you to UAlbany?
The interdisciplinary and holistic vision of UAlbany and the AI Plus Institute attracted me the most. UAlbany’s vision for AI research spans a broad spectrum from nanotechnology to health sciences to ethics and philosophy. Coupling this ambitious research agenda with AI education for all students through new courses and microcredentials and dedicated supercomputing resources for AI research, UAlbany gives researchers a powerful landscape for turning innovative visions into actualities. UAlbany’s visionary leadership team and its highly motivated researchers are already making great strides in advancing AI research and making it beneficial to society. I am really glad to have the opportunity to be part of this exciting AI landscape at UAlbany.
Your background is in health care applications for AI and human-computer interaction (HCI). What excites you most about where those fields will go next?
Both these areas have had the advantage of multiple synergistic research advances happening in the same period: faster/smaller devices and chips, better ways of sensing environmental and personal information, ultra high-speed internet for communication, longer-lasting batteries, better data storage and access mechanisms, to name a few. The momentum in these areas is building rapidly, and we should be seeing faster and better resources available for AI and human-computer interaction. This would, in turn, mean the researchers would have access to equipment that can help them experiment with possibilities that they could not even imagine before. In some sense, I am reminded of the old TV show Magic School Bus’s teacher, Ms. Frizzle, shouting, “Seatbelts, everyone!” We are all in for faster, better, and more exciting things in AI and HCI. Maybe, in near future, we can do this interview by emailing/texting our thoughts instead of typing or talking.
What did your time at the NSF teach you about the importance of the federal government’s role in research?
NSF is organized as a cluster of “directorates” (the Engineering Directorate, Computer Science Directorate, Social & Behavioral Sciences Directorate, etc.) comprising multiple divisions targeting different areas of focused research. This is like universities having colleges or schools and departments within these colleges and schools. I served in the Computer Science Directorate as part of the Intelligent & Information Systems Division. But I was fortunate that I was able to work with many, if not all, of the directorates and had leadership positions in multiple programs, such as the NSF National AI Institutes, Smart & Connected Health, and Future of Work.
The importance of the federal government’s role in coordinating and funding research is multi-faceted: 1) making the research funding agencies “researcher facing” to understand the advances as they are happening; 2) prioritizing the research funding opportunities to align with national priorities and increase national competitiveness; 3) promoting quality research by holding fair peer-review processes to select the research projects (and the researchers) that can advance the nation’s strategic capabilities; 4) engaging — and partnering, as appropriate — with leading industries and international research agencies; and 5) last, but not the least, communicating and collaborating with other federal agencies to avoid duplication of efforts. These functions are critical to ensuring we are spending precious federal research dollars on the right things and in the right ways on projects very likely to benefit the public and national interest.
What is something that you think most people get wrong, or fundamentally misunderstand, about AI and its applications?
The wrong expectations or perceptions are typically at either end of the spectrum: “AI can and will do everything” or “AI is evil.” For instance, a prominent faculty researcher once asked me, “Can AI do better than my top graduate research student in terms of creative ideas?” I answered him: “AI can help your top grad student to be more efficient and more productive.” This is a typical case of high expectations, thinking AI can do human, expert-level activities. Whereas AI can be harnessed by human experts to carry out some tasks that are repetitive or monotonous to free humans’ time to carry out more challenging tasks. On the other end, people tend to be suspicious of AI as something that should not be even touched with a long pole. It is true that AI has some known limitations and risks. Once you are aware of them, people can avoid the pitfalls and enjoy the help of AI.
Do you think we tend to overestimate or underestimate AI’s current capabilities?
Instead of judging it as overestimation or underestimation, I would rather say that people estimate AI’s current capabilities in a highly subjective manner. People seem to form opinions based on social media posts, news articles, friends/family members’ views, etc. Based on these opinions, people may fully trust AI’s capabilities or be skeptical of its capabilities, even without trying to use AI applications. In my view, this emphasizes the need for AI literacy programs that can provide a balanced view of AI and its capabilities, explaining when AI can help, how AI can make mistakes, and why people should be exercising their own judgment instead of fully (or blindly) relying on AI, or staying away from it completely.
If you weren’t leading AI research, what would you be doing?
My primary research interests are in health care applications for AI and human-computer interaction, specifically physical medicine and rehabilitation and speech pathology. , This includes exploring how to use virtual and mixed reality in mirror therapy to treat people experiencing phantom pain in an amputated limb. I am very passionate about this research and the beneficial impacts it has on society. If I had not gotten the opportunity to be leading AI research, I would still be a part of it, doing my research, perhaps at a smaller scale than that is possible now with this leadership position.