Four Faculty Members Win SUNY-IBM AI Research Grants

ALBANY, N.Y. (Oct. 31, 2024) — Four University at Albany faculty members have received grants from the SUNY-IBM AI Research Alliance for their work to advance the efficiency and trustworthiness of artificial intelligence systems.

Chancellor John B. King Jr. announced the 2024 grants on Monday, and UAlbany was one of two SUNY Research Centers to receive four grants this year out of a total of 14 projects funded systemwide.

“UAlbany researchers are developing more powerful and efficient AI hardware and models without losing sight of critical questions about their trustworthiness and the ethics of their use,” said UAlbany Vice President for Research and Economic Development Thenkurussi (Kesh) Kesavadas. “This is exactly the kind of innovative interdisciplinary work we envisioned when UAlbany launched its AI Plus initiative, and these collaborations highlight how our researchers are working thoughtfully with industry to advance our understanding of artificial intelligence and its deployment for the public good.”

The projects funded at UAlbany were:
 

Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) for AI Applications

Nathaniel Cady, Department of Nanoscale Science & Engineering

Assistant Professor Yin’s group is studying the substantial memory and computational demands that make it difficult to efficiently deploy the large AI models that are revolutionizing digital tasks like summarization, programming and content generation. They are working to develop two optimization techniques to reduce the model size and memory usage of pre-trained AI models, using only a small fraction of the original training data for calibration. The first technique, called quantization, reduces the precision of model parameters from 32-bit floating-point to ultra low-bit integer representations. The second technique, called pruning, identifies and removes less important parameters to streamline the model. They also are focusing on creating tensor-compressed training algorithms for efficient fine-tuning on specific downstream tasks, balancing model complexity and performance.

Integrating AI across disciplines

The announcement of the SUNY-IBM AI Research Alliance grants comes three weeks after King and Gov. Kathy Hochul joined President Havidán Rodríguez on campus to unveil UAlbany’s state-of-the-art new AI supercomputer. The new AI system is a central pillar of UAlbany’s ambitious AI Plus initiative to integrate AI across its academic and research portfolios.

The SUNY-IBM AI Research Alliance is led by a Scientific Advisory Council of distinguished faculty members and research leaders from SUNY and IBM who provide strategic direction and guidance. Research projects are jointly envisioned and conducted by SUNY faculty and IBM researchers, and the first grants were awarded in 2020.

Separately, in 2023 UAlbany and IBM collaborated to found the Center for Emerging Artificial Intelligence Systems to fund research projects of mutual interest, including those that make use of the prototype IBM Artificial Intelligence Unit computing cluster installed at UAlbany earlier this year. UAlbany was the first university in the world to receive the new IBM AIU chips.

Through SUNY, UAlbany also is a partner in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $400 million public-private Empire AI Consortium, which was launched earlier this year to bring universities and industry leaders together to ensure New York remains a leader in AI R&D as well as the responsible deployment of the technology.