AI-empowered research initiative signals UChicago’s ambitious vision for future

Artificial intelligence is transforming daily life, but how will AI continue reshaping the way we learn and discover? In 2024, President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Katherine Baicker convened a university-wide committee to explore this question and its implications for research and education at the University of Chicago.

UChicago recently launched an ambitious AI initiative, which supported 15 faculty and staff proposals—10 groups focused on AI and research, and five groups focused on AI and education. At a Feb. 12 event on campus, UChicago scholars discussed their projects, which leverage expertise across a myriad of fields spanning archaeology, visual arts, public policy, natural sciences, economics, law, medicine and philosophy; as well as efforts focused on AI and education. 

In his opening remarks, President Paul Alivisatos called this moment “a signal period in intellectual history.” He added: “This heralds a new chapter of thinking with machines. I believe it is critical that we approach this time of vast scholarly opportunity by centering the human experience and empowering and challenging the finest minds in the world—so many of whom are at UChicago among our students and faculty.”

In this clip from President Paul Alivisatos’s opening remarks from the AI event, he described this as a “signal period in intellectual history and in the possibility for the advancement of human thought,” noting how AI and machine learning will open “new ways of seeing and learning that span and expand our intellectual universe.”Video by UChicago Creative

“This initiative is building bridges across campus…bringing together depth of expertise in AI methods and across domains, to tackle questions no discipline can answer alone,” said Rebecca Willett, faculty director of AI at the Data Science Institute and the Worah Family Professor in the Wallman Society of Fellows in the Departments of Statistics, Computer Science, and the College. “Facilitating that bridge-building across disciplines is going to lead us to entirely new fields of inquiry.”

Learn more about these research projects below:

Culture and creativity in an AI-empowered society

Teams in this research theme are examining how AI could be used to enrich lives through the arts. They aim to treat creativity as exploration, innovation, and invention while bringing together diverse institutes, departments, and organizations. 

• Prof. Timothy Harrison, director of UChicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, discussed how his team’s AI-powered geospatial modeling and language analysis can illuminate the complex history of human-environment interaction in a way that “reveals the past and guides the future.”
• Assoc. Prof. Jason Salavon shared examples of work already happening at UChicago, from visualizing the interior of text models to research using electrical muscle stimulation to collaborate with dancers on improvised choreography. 

Learning the rules of life and the universe

Spanning cognitive science, physics, and cell biology, this research theme asks how AI can help scientists discover the fundamental principles governing minds, matter, and living systems. 

• Prof. James Evans described his team’s work building curiosity into AI’s structure to enable “disruptive hypothesis generation” at the margins of what we already know. Their goal, he explained, is “to build the least human AI rather than the most human,” to ultimately move “from digital twins to designing friendly cultural and cognitive aliens.”
• Prof. Margaret Gardel and her collaborators are building AI frameworks to predict, understand and engineer life across biological scales. The work is supported by the NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology and the Biohub.
• Prof. Abigail Vieregg outlined her team’s vision for scientific labs that accelerate discovery and innovation in experimental science using AI as a co-pilot to transform the design, deployment, operation, and data collection of sensors and sensor systems. 

AI for resilient and adaptive societies

Teams from Chicago Booth, the Becker Friedman Institute, the Harris School of Public Policy, the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy & Practice, and the Law School are partnering with Fortune 500 companies, NGOs, and government agencies to understand how AI might spur and support societal change.

• Working with Harris School colleagues and the Indian government, Assoc. Prof. Pedram Hassanzadeh described how AI-driven models can generate forecasts 100,000 times faster than traditional methods. His team delivered monsoon onset predictions to 38 million farmers in 2025, demonstrating how these models can help society.
• Asst. Prof. Anders Humlum and his team are designing novel experiments and assessment tools to observe how organizations are adopting AI and to investigate the complex questions about modern AI’s effect on workforce adaptation and inequality.
• Prof. Nicole Marwell’s research team oriented its work around a central tension—governance depends on stability and predictability, but AI introduces uncertainty and risk. “How does AI challenge the rules and practices of governance?” she asked. “How can we reimagine governance to advance the public good, cultivate innovation, and manage risk?” 

AI in the service of therapeutics

Two research projects aim to accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries into lifesaving drug treatments, building on the longstanding partnership between the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center and Argonne National Laboratory.

• Prof. Rama Ranganathan discussed how his team is using generative AI and statistical models to engineer new biological systems, as well as to discover design rules across scales of biology.
• Prof. Rick Stevens outlined his team’s goals to use AI to move beyond reviewing data to actively discovering new dynamics, interactions, and modules to accelerate the development of novel therapeutics, expand the diversity of target molecules, and lower costs. 

Teaching students to think with and about AI

Five teams funded by the AI and Education Working Group explore how AI alters, enhances, and disrupts existing classroom practices and dynamics. 

One of the 12 projects, led by Julia Koschinsky of the Center for Spatial Data Science, is researching how to help students use AI to strengthen, rather than bypass, their reasoning skills. Another team, led by Asst. Prof. Mina Lee in Computer Science and Data Science, is deliberately building friction into AI interactions to promote a participant’s more mindful use of large language models.

Looking to the future

The event concluded with a panel discussion on what it means for a university to lead in AI research—a conversation that brought together scholars spanning computer science, statistics, cinema and media studies, African history, and econometrics.

In her closing remarks, Baicker discussed what makes UChicago’s approach to AI distinctive. “Not only that we have doctors who talk to artists who talk to philosophers,” she explained, “it’s the culture of rigorous questioning. That’s how ideas get better.”

These AI-focused UChicago research projects will continue to develop over the coming year, with teams 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 that was first published on the Data Science Institute website.