UB|AI Chat Series Launch

Good morning!

Thank you for joining us as we welcome SUNY Chancellor John King back to UB. It is an honor to have the chancellor with us today.

The start of the fall semester is always an exciting time of year at UB, but Chancellor King’s visit makes it that much more eventful. As we begin our academic year, we look forward to continuing to leverage UB’s academic excellence and research innovations to solve society’s grand challenges.

Clearly, the nation’s most selective funding agencies are taking note of the meaningful research we are undertaking at UB. That’s why our sponsored research expenditures continue to rise, along with the number of active awards.

Of note to today’s discussion, these awards include a 20-million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to establish the A.I. Institute for Exceptional Education at UB—an N-S-F center of excellence.

Looking at our sponsored research expenditures more broadly, the 2022 fiscal year marked the first time in university history that UB surpassed 200 million dollars. And in our 2023 fiscal year, our expenditures increased an impressive 16 percent—to 232 million dollars. Moreover, with Governor Hochul’s investment in our academic and research enterprise, UB will make an even more profound impact on the many communities we serve.

On behalf of our entire scholarly community, I would like to thank Governor Hochul and the Western New York delegation for their steadfast support of both the SUNY System as a whole, and UB’s strategic priorities as a SUNY flagship. This includes support for hiring faculty with expertise in research areas that align with state and federal priorities, including:

• Biomedicine and biotechnology;
  
• Semiconductors and sensors; and
• Artificial intelligence.

This academic year, we were delighted to welcome to UB more than 150 new faculty from across the disciplines.

In anticipation of the new semester, we also made major upgrades to our living-learning environment, including our classrooms and residence halls. The capital funding support from New York State will also enable UB to extend the benefits of our research throughout the region, state, nation and world.

Of course, we continue to plan for our new building for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which will amplify our research innovations and our entrepreneurial activities.

Related, the Chancellor and I had the opportunity to meet with students at UB’s Blackstone LaunchPad earlier today. I hope Chancellor King’s conversations with our students gave him a sense of the robust entrepreneurial ecosystem we are cultivating at UB. In recent years, we have greatly expanded our programs in this domain so our students and faculty have the comprehensive support they need to bring their innovations to the marketplace.

With all of these endeavors, we are focused not on the bottom line, but the greater good. In this way, UB is contributing to the economic development, prosperity and vitality of our region and state.

Today we’re here to discuss an area of interdisciplinary strength that has implications for every aspect of our life—from our homes and health, to education, transportation, communication, national security, and much more.

I’m speaking, of course, about artificial intelligence. We are delighted Chancellor King could join us for the first event in our UB|AI Chat Series—“Harnessing AI for Public Good.”

Before our panel discussion begins, I know we are all looking forward to hearing from our SUNY Chancellor, whom I now have the honor of inviting to the podium.

Chancellor King?