Enrollment surges in UB's AI master’s degree program

For decades, UB has provided students with cutting-edge tutelage in artificial intelligence.

From machine learning in the 1970s and pattern recognition in the 1990s to large language models today, UB students have graduated with skills that top businesses, government agencies and academic institutions covet.

Now, with AI at the forefront of public consciousness, more UB students than ever are studying the subject. This is due, in part, to a Master of Science program focusing on AI that UB launched nearly five years ago.

Enrollment in the AI Master’s program — officially known as Master of Science in Engineering Science with a focus in AI — began with five students in the spring 2020 semester. This fall, it surged to 73 students, with an additional 50 expected next semester.

“The growth of our master’s program focusing on artificial intelligence has been nothing short of spectacular,” notes Kemper E. Lewis, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which administers the program. “It shows that we’re providing students with in-demand skills that they can use for the betterment of society.”

He attributes the rise in enrollment to a variety of factors, including how interest in AI spiked after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022.

Equally important, he says, are critical investments that UB and its partners have made to grow UB’s expertise and infrastructure in AI research and education. This includes Advancing Top 25: Faculty Hiring, a UB initiative that has added to the more than 200 faculty members researching AI. Another key factor is UB’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, which harnesses the collective power of those faculty members.

Also incredibly important is Empire AI, a $400 million statewide research consortium created by Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers that focuses on responsible AI research and education. UB is a founding member of Empire AI, and it will be home to the consortium’s supercomputing center.

“All of these factors have led to a tremendous amount of momentum and innovation in research and education programs focused on artificial intelligence at the University at Buffalo,” says Lewis.

The MS program, which typically takes 12-18 months to complete, provides students with a foundational knowledge in AI and its many subsets, says the program’s director, Mingchen Gao, associate professor of computer science and engineering, who specializes in medical imaging informatics, computer vision and machine learning.

Those subsets include, but are not limited to, machine learning, programming languages, deep learning algorithms and advanced artificial neural networks.

Alumni have taken jobs at Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, Visa, Radical.AI and Salesforce, as well as such Buffalo-area companies as M&T Bank and CUBRC.

The initiative is just one at UB providing students with educational and research experience in AI. Numerous programs in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, as well as other academic units, provide undergraduate and graduate students with opportunities to study AI.

Meanwhile, large federal research grants, including $20 million to establish the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education and, announced last month, $10 million to create the Center for Early Literacy and Responsible AI, allow students to apply what they’ve learned on critically important research projects.

“It’s really an exciting time to be at UB, especially for our students engaged in learning about the incredible opportunities that AI presents for tackling society’s greatest challenges,” says Lewis.