Xiong named director of Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Jinjun Xiong, PhD, SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been named director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (IAD).

Xiong assumed the role Oct. 1. He succeeds SUNY Empire Innovation Professor David Doermann, PhD, who was appointed interim chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

“Innovation in artificial intelligence and data science has significant potential to unlock solutions that address some of society’s biggest challenges,” said Xiong. “I am honored to lead the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science in continuing its mission of conducting important multidisciplinary research and educational programs. We remain dedicated to our objective of being at the forefront of innovation in AI and data science.”

IAD was established in 2021, combining UB’s Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Institute for Computational Data Science. IAD has helped position UB at the forefront of AI and data science by bringing together faculty and labs from across UB, as well as existing centers of excellence, to promote multidisciplinary research and curriculum development. As a result, UB has been further recognized as an international leader in AI research and in creating, curating, and disseminating data and computing-related knowledge and skills. Since its inception,

Xiong is also the scientific director and co-director for the $20 million National AI Institute for Exceptional Education at UB. The institute is funded the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences, which is part of U.S. Department of Education.

Before joining UB in 2021, Xiong was a senior researcher and program director for AI and Hybrid Clouds Systems at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He is a former co-founder and co-director of the IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR), which in five years led to a $200 million expansion of the center to the IBM Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute. Xiong was also the founding principal investigator for the IBM Smarter Energy Research Institute (SERI), a multinational industry consortium focusing on renewable integration and sustainability.

Xiong’s research interests are in across-stack AI systems research, which includes AI applications, algorithms, tooling and computer architectures. Many of his research results have been adopted in IBM’s products and tools. He has published more than 160 peer-reviewed papers in top AI and systems conferences. His publications have won eight best paper awards and eight nominations for best paper awards. He also won top awards from various international competitions, including the championship award for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Graph Challenge on accelerating sparse neural networks in 2020 and the First Place Awards for the 2019 Design Automation Conference Systems Design Contest on designing an object detection neural network for edge field programmable gate arrays and graphics processing unit devices, respectively.

“We are thankful for David Doermann’s service and leadership as IAD’s inaugural director. He brought together faculty and labs from across the university, as well as existing centers of excellence, to promote groundbreaking multidisciplinary research and curriculum development. He has established IAD as a pillar of UB’s pursuit of Top 25 status among the nation’s research-intensive universities,” said Venu Govindaraju, vice president for research and economic development.

A UB faculty member since 2018, Doermann served as IAD director during the institute’s establishment. He was recently nominated to the New York State Governor’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation, representing the SUNY system. He also serves on the SUNY Strategic Research InVEstment (STRIVE) Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and the UB Task Force on Generative AI in Teaching and Learning. 

The University at Buffalo has been a worldwide leader in artificial intelligence research and education for nearly 50 years. This includes pioneering work creating the world’s first autonomous handwriting recognition system, which the U.S. Postal Service and Royal Mail adopted to save billions of dollars. As New York’s flagship university, that legacy of innovation continues today. UB researchers are committed to using AI for social good, including developing new technology that addresses the shortage of speech-language pathologists in K-12 education, deepfakes, the need for improved medical imaging and more.