Artificial intelligence is transforming everyday life, but how will it continue to reshape the way we learn and discover? In 2024, President Paul Alivisatos and Chancellor Kathleen Biker convened a university-wide committee to consider this question and its impact on research and teaching at the University of Chicago.
The University of Chicago recently launched an ambitious AI initiative to support 15 faculty proposals. Ten of the groups focused on AI and research, and five focused on AI and education. At an event held on campus on February 12, Chicago scholars discussed their projects that draw on expertise across a myriad of disciplines spanning archaeology, visual arts, public policy, natural sciences, economics, law, medicine, and philosophy. So are efforts focused on AI and education.
In his opening remarks, President Paul Alivisatos called this moment a “signal period in intellectual history.” “This heralds a new chapter in machine thinking. I believe it is important to address this vast academic opportunity by centering the human experience and empowering and challenging the world’s greatest minds, many of whom are students and faculty at the University of California, Chicago.”
“This initiative is building bridges across campus…bringing together AI methods and deep expertise across disciplines to address questions that no one discipline can answer alone,” said Rebecca Willett, chair of the AI department in the Data Science Institute and Walla Family Professor in the Department of Statistics, Department of Computer Science, and the University’s Wollman Society of Fellows. “By fostering bridges across disciplines, we are leading to entirely new areas of research.”
Find out more about these research projects below.
Culture and creativity in an AI-powered society
This research team is looking at how AI can be used to enrich lives through the arts. They aim to treat creativity as exploration, innovation and invention, bringing together diverse institutions, sectors and organizations. Associate Professor Jason Saravon shared examples of research already being done in Chicago, from internal visualization of text models to research using electrical muscle stimulation to collaborate with dancers on improvised choreography.
Learn the laws of life and the universe
This research topic spans cognitive science, physics, and cell biology and asks how AI can help scientists discover the fundamental principles governing mind, matter, and living systems.
- professor. James Evans described his team’s efforts to build curiosity into the fabric of AI to enable “disruptive hypothesis generation” at the limits of what we already know. Their goal, he explained, is to “build the most human-like AI, not the most human-like AI,” ultimately moving “from a digital twin to a friendly cultural and cognitive alien design.”
- Professor Margaret Gardel and her collaborators are building AI frameworks to predict, understand, and design life at the biological scale. This research is supported by the NSF-Simons National Institute for Biological Theoretical Mathematics and BioHub.
AI for resilient and adaptive societies
Teams at Chicago Booth, the Becker Friedman Institute, the Harris School of Public Policy, the Crown Family School of Social Work Policy & Practice, and the School of Law are partnering with Fortune 500 companies, NGOs, and government agencies to understand how AI can drive and support social change.
- Professor Nicole Marwell’s research team focused their research around the central tension that governance depends on stability and predictability, but AI introduces uncertainty and risk. “How will AI challenge the rules and practices of governance?” she asked. “How can we reimagine governance to advance the public good, foster innovation, and manage risk?”
- In collaboration with colleagues at the Harris School and the Government of India, Professor Assoc. Pedram Hassanzadeh explained how AI-driven models can generate predictions 100,000 times faster than traditional methods. His team provided 2025 monsoon onset predictions to 38 million farmers, demonstrating how these models can help society.
AI in treatment
The two research projects aim to accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries into life-saving drug treatments, building on a long-standing partnership between the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center and Argonne National Laboratory.
- Professor Rick Stevens outlined the team’s goal of using AI to go beyond reviewing data to proactively discover new dynamics, interactions, and modules to accelerate the development of new therapeutics, expand the diversity of target molecules, and reduce costs.
- Professor Rama Ranganathan described how his team uses generative AI and statistical models to design new biological systems and discover design rules across biological scales.
Teach students to think about AI
Five teams, funded by the AI and Education Working Group, are investigating how AI changes, enhances, and disrupts existing classroom practices and dynamics.
One of 12 projects led by Julia Kosinski t’sThe Spatial Data Science Center is researching ways to help students use AI to enhance rather than circumvent their reasoning skills. Another team led by Ast. Computer science and data science professor Mina Lee intentionally builds friction into AI interactions to encourage more careful use of large-scale language models by participants.
Looking to the future
The event concluded with a panel discussion about what it means for universities to lead in AI research. The discussion brought together scholars across computer science, statistics, film and media studies, African history, and econometrics.
In his closing remarks, Byker explained what makes the University of Chicago’s approach to AI unique. “We don’t just have doctors talking to artists and talking to philosophers. It’s a culture of rigorous questioning, and that’s how ideas get better,” she explained.
These AI-focused Chicago research projects will continue to grow over the next year, with the team planning workshops, events, and community-building activities open to the campus community.
For more information about the UChicago AI Initiative or to get involved, contact aiinitiative@uchicago.edu.
—Adapted from a story originally published on the Data Science Institute website.
