UT designated 2024 as the “Year of AI” to highlight the University’s achievements in artificial intelligence research and to set the stage for future developments.

In the coming months, the University will set up a calendar with seminars, workshops and meetings that highlight the artificial intelligence research happening on campus. Dan Jaffe, vice president of research, said these events aim to bring together different parts of campus and make different departments’ work visible to each other.

“UT is a very funny place in the sense that it’s both deep in many areas and very, very broad,” Jaffe said. “There’s a huge campus with a great faculty and research staff and excellent students, and they’re in different parts of campus doing similar things that they may not even know about.”

Jaffe said the “Year of AI”  builds on the development of the Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning and the completion of the fastest academic supercomputer on campus. The University also wants to continue to highlight ethical AI through the Good Systems challenges.

 Good Systems aims to utilize ethical AI to impact a broad range of industries and help students learn to adapt to the fast-evolving pace of artificial intelligence, said Matthew Lease, school of information professor and Good Systems executive.

“UT is increasingly responsive to the way the world is changing (and) the prominent role artificial intelligence is taking,” Lease said.  “(UT wants to) make sure that students who are here for education or research are really being taught and exposed to the latest advances and helping advance that AI even further.” 

UT research assistant Aaron Purewal utilizes AI to create high-quality, immersive tours of UT that can be accessible to anyone. Purewal said artificial intelligence allows him to take videos and photos of buildings, run them through artificial intelligence machine learning models and have 3D models within minutes.

Purewal said it’s important for people to be knowledgeable about how these tools work.

“2024 is going to be a crazy year, even crazier than 2023 for the pace of AI,” Purewal said. “In every niche, anything you can think of can be enhanced by some sort of AI model in some sort of way.”