Empire AI, a consortium of 11 public and private academic institutions including Columbia University, partially funded by New York State, has received a grant totaling more than $1 million from Google.org to support its work advancing the effective integration of artificial intelligence into higher education. The award, led by the City University of New York (CUNY), will further the reach of a comprehensive, multi-institution assessment of how best to prepare students across all degree levels and disciplines for an AI-driven workforce.
“The success of Empire AI has been not only in giving academia access to state-of-the-art computing facilities for AI research, but also in leveraging our unique statewide collaboration that is attracting additional funding, including from non-profits and industry,” said Executive Vice President for Research Jeannette Wing.
“The funded project at Columbia will support a cohort of faculty in leading initiatives that design and pilot discipline-specific curricular renewal and research training, while engaging with artificial intelligence as an urgent and cross-cutting dimension of academic work,” said Professor Tian Zheng, who will lead this AI education effort at Columbia.
“Google recognized the value of the Empire AI consortium to look at issues at scale—in particular looking at how we can help students use AI to learn across degree type, different systems, and different areas of study,” said Joshua Brumberg, president of the CUNY Graduate Center. “Our goal is to discern if similar interventions can work across all these areas of post-secondary educational achievement.”
The Empire AI consortium includes the CUNY Graduate Center, Columbia University, Cornell University, Icahn School of Medicine, New York University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the State University of New York, University at Buffalo, and University of Rochester. Together, these institutions will ensure that New York’s students—from associate to doctoral levels—receive the training necessary to thrive in a rapidly evolving AI-enabled workplace.
