UAlbany Launches New AI & Society College, Research Center
ALBANY, N.Y. (April 4, 2025) — The University at Albany is launching a new Artificial Intelligence & Society College to help prepare students to navigate a world radically changed by AI with a focus on trustworthiness, equity, privacy and accountability.
The new college will spearhead significant expansion of UAlbany's AI-infused curriculum across all nine schools and colleges. The associated new AI & Society Research Center will catalyze research initiatives that bring together scholars in the humanities, social sciences and creative arts with technologists focused on leveraging AI for public good.
Rather than students enrolling directly in the new college, the idea is to harness campus-wide expertise to help schools and colleges develop curricula that can be integrated into UAlbany’s 59 undergraduate majors and more than 150 graduate programs. This holistic — rather than siloed — approach is an outgrowth of UAlbany’s AI Plus initiative, which was launched in 2022 to make teaching and research about AI accessible to every student on campus.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s 2023 launch of the Empire AI consortium, in which SUNY and UAlbany are key partners, accelerated that work.
“The Artificial Intelligence & Society College is the next step in UAlbany’s innovative and inclusive approach to preparing our students to lead a world where AI is ubiquitous and transformative,” President Havidán Rodríguez said. “This is what every institution of higher education owes its students, the chance to gain the knowledge and skills that will enable them to succeed today and in the future. Our holistic, university-wide AI Plus initiative aims to provide AI-focused courses to every student—from the arts to public health to engineering. This new college will accelerate and coordinate that work at a time when our students and society have never needed it more.”
AI-Focused Courses Spanning Every Discipline
College leadership will work with faculty in UAlbany’s schools and colleges to develop new courses and approaches to integrating AI into existing coursework across every discipline and major. That work will include additional introductory and advanced courses focused on AI as well as 7-credit microcredentials that will allow students to demonstrate mastery of key concepts to potential future employers. A student, for example, could major in communication in the College of Arts & Sciences while also pursuing an AI-focused microcredential developed by faculty in that department with the support of the AI & Society College.
“Computer and data science are essential to understanding AI, but they are just a starting point,” said Carol H. Kim, UAlbany’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “We have an obligation as a public university to ensure that all our students are prepared to succeed in a society transformed by artificial intelligence —and to ensure we are educating teachers, nurses, nonprofit leaders, engineers, lawyers and artists who are equipped to use this knowledge in ways that benefit their communities. The AI & Society College is an innovative approach to doing that by placing the emphasis on ensuring access to as many students as possible.”
Exploring AI’s Impact on Social Science and the Humanities
The college will work closely with a new AI & Society Research Center, which will be part of UAlbany’s existing AI Plus Institute — a hub for all AI-related scholarship on campus — and focus on themes like human solidarity, human flourishing, human resilience, human imagination and human connection.
“AI’s influence spans every field of study, and I am energized by the promising new research collaborations that the AI & Society Research Center will help seed,” said Thenkurussi (Kesh) Kesavadas, UAlbany’s vice president for research and economic development. “With scores of AI experts on our faculty, we will push the frontiers on not just hardware and software but also the critical questions surrounding AI’s impact on our lives and how we interact with the machines themselves. Further, the research center will work with the community to explore the issues and challenges they face that can be addressed by the deep AI expertise at UAlbany.”
The new college will be led by Director Jason D’Cruz, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, and Associate Director Hany Elgala, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. The new research center will be led by Director Eric Stern, professor in the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, and Associate Director Elizabeth Gray.
Together, the college and research center will educate a diverse, AI-savvy workforce while also creating opportunities for cross-disciplinary research, community outreach, education and networking on critical issues related to AI’s social impact.
The college was proposed in response to a call from SUNY, and the initial funding of $2.4 million over three years was announced Friday by Gov. Hochul.
Advancing AI Plus
Since the launch of AI Plus, UAlbany has been deeply engaged in developing new AI-focused coursework across all nine schools and colleges. That includes a three-tiered progression of coursework available to every student in every major. This progression carries students from a general understanding of foundational principles of AI to discipline-specific courses focused on the potential societal risks of AI, algorithmic bias, decision making and security, as well as ethics, equity and privacy.
The University also has continued to develop more traditional AI programs, such as a new graduate certificate in Data Science for Public Affairs and a new AI concentration in the computer science master’s program, as well as undergraduate minors in game design and machine learning.
UAlbany’s recently approved undergraduate major and graduate program in game design — a collaboration among the departments of Information Sciences and Technology, Art and Art History, and Music and Theatre — are a model for how AI-related learning can engage students in any discipline.
Under the umbrella of AI Plus, UAlbany has hired more than two dozen new AI-focused faculty across every school and college as part of the largest cluster hire in University history.
The University also has dramatically expanded the AI computing power available on campus. In October, UAlbany celebrated the completion of its new on-campus AI supercomputer as part of an overall $37 million commitment to upgrading the University’s computing infrastructure.
In early 2024, UAlbany was the first institution in the world to install a cluster of IBM Artificial Intelligence Unit chips, which are powering new research projects through the $20 million UAlbany-IBM Center for Emerging Artificial Intelligence Systems.