According to an Oct. 16 announcement from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, UAlbany and IBM’s Center for Emerging Artificial Intelligence Systems (CEAIS) is a $20 million initiative to expand researchers’ access to AI supercomputing resources and advance ongoing AI research. A news release from the university said the partnership was announced at the inaugural State University of New York (SUNY) system’s AI Symposium, an event that brought together researchers from across the SUNY system to discuss their work in AI research amid advances in the field.
“Researchers across UAlbany’s nine schools and colleges are employing artificial intelligence to power new discoveries about our world, and we are committed to giving them the best tools to develop critical new knowledge and advance the state of the art in their fields,” UAlbany President Havidán Rodríguez said in a public statement. “The Center for Emerging Artificial Intelligence Systems will significantly expand UAlbany researchers’ access to AI supercomputing resources and make our university a leading academic test bed for some of the latest computing technology developed by IBM.”
As part of the announcement about the new center, officials said a new AI Research Group will advise SUNY about AI research, education, policy and workforce development initiatives. One member of the group, UAlbany Vice President for Research and Economic Development Thenkurussi Kesavadas, told Government Technology that the new center represents a major step in the university’s AI Plus initiative, which he described as an effort to integrate teaching and learning about AI across the university’s departments and disciplines.
He said the goal of the new center is to put university researchers and IBM’s expertise and resources together to advance AI research in the years to come, adding that the new center also builds on SUNY’s involvement in the IBM Research AI Hardware Center, founded in 2019 for collaborative research into faster, more energy-efficient chips.
“IBM does a lot of research at Albany Nanotech, which is a semiconductor complex here [involved in] developing AI, new AI hardware and things like that,” he said. “What we have done is we have developed a partnership specifically looking at emerging areas of AI and looking at how the next generation of hardware can improve AI performance. … We have a lot of very talented and knowledgeable AI professional scientists on campus now, and this center will give them the opportunity to work on cutting-edge hardware that IBM is developing, and at the same time, also work with [other experts] in the AI space to collaborate and look at the future of AI.”
The launch of the new center comes as universities such as the University of Texas system, Colby College, Purdue University and others are investing millions to expand academic and research programming centered on AI technology. Unlike IBM, Kesavadas said, higher-ed institutions alone often do not have the resources for advanced AI research.
“We want to make sure that we can do really advanced AI research on campus. If you look at all the cutting-edge work in AI coming out now, it’s mostly coming from very large companies, like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Meta. … Universities don’t have access to as much hardware and computing infrastructure that’s required,” he said. “This center — and also our AI Plus program that we launched with a $75 million investment from the state of New York — is really geared towards providing our faculty members with the kind of resources and computing power that is not traditionally available at universities.”
