It all adds up to a greater good

For Siva, who has dedicated his career to computations—including pioneering work in the field of information complexity while a researcher at IBM—this was a thrilling moment.

“The movie portrays how, as an African American woman, she was probably an unlikely candidate to be doing this kind of work,” says Siva.

Atri Rudra, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is the first person to hold this endowed chair position.   

“It is an absolute honor to receive the Katherine Johnson endowed chair position,” Rudra says. “While I am nowhere near the caliber of mathematician that [she] was, I do feel a kinship in that I’m also a mathematician. In fact, being a mathematician is also something that I share with Siva.”

Rudra is a member of UB’s Computing for Social Good group, where he is involved in research to learn how computing can help decision-making in the U.S. foster care system, as well as an effort to incorporate more responsible computing and ethical thinking into the undergraduate curriculum. More broadly, his research interests include issues at the intersection of society and computing, structured linear algebra and database algorithms.

He is the faculty mentor to UB’s Society and Computing Club and DivTech, a student club that aims to increase diversity in STEM fields. Jinhui Xu, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, calls Rudra “a particularly appropriate recipient. He is a passionate advocate for increasing and supporting diversity in computer science and engineering,” Xu says, “and is committed to teaching students about the impacts of computing on society, both negative and positive.”

Siva’s gift supports traditional research and teaching activities as well as visits and talks by scholars whose multidisciplinary work may be harder to support with funding from traditional sources. In addition, as chair, Rudra supports student activities such as funding projects that incorporate responsible computing and those that take a holistic view of how computing is situated within society, as well as facilitating dialog among students from multiple disciplines and lived experiences about computing and society.

“Specifically, I’m very excited that the gift will also help bootstrap some of the new efforts that I’m involved in with Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller, an associate professor in the department of history, to adapt her amazing ʻImpossible Project’ framework to some of our computer science and engineering courses in general, and specifically in some of my courses,” Rudra says. “Unlike most of my previous work, this combines both teaching and research, which makes it especially close to my heart.”

Beyond UB, Rudra is co-chair, with University at Albany associate professor Jason D’Cruz, of the Social Impact, Ethics and Trustworthiness working group within SUNY’s Artificial Intelligence task force. He has ongoing collaborative research with Chris Re at Stanford University in designing new language models that could lead to generative AI tools to write longer essays, including FlashAttention, used by virtually every large tech company.

Rudra is a co-editor of the Mozilla Teaching Responsible Computing playbook, a guide on how colleges and universities can update curricula to place more emphasis on ethics when designing technology products. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, IBM and the National Institutes of Health, among others.

“Gifts such as this are incredibly important, as they support our core values of providing an inclusive and equitable educational experience for all our engineers and scientists,” says Kemper Lewis, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.