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Get the most interesting and important stories from the University of Pittsburgh.Pitt Chancellor Joan Gabel and Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian celebrated Pittsburgh’s role as an AI Tech Community by signing a ceremonial memorandum of understanding with NVIDIA at AI Horizons Pittsburgh on Oct. 14. The summit included keynote remarks from Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, discussing Pittsburgh’s global role in human-first AI innovation.
“It’s an exciting time for Pitt and for Pittsburgh,” said Chancellor Joan Gabel in remarks preceding the MOU signing. “I want to express our pride of collaboration with NVIDIA as well as our pride in our city and with our neighbor and our friends at Carnegie Mellon University on what is truly a historic, new legacy-building day.”
Hooman Rashidi, associate dean for AI in medicine at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine, also served as a panelist on a session examining the AI innovations that will shape the future of health, including data protection and patient privacy.
Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of the School of Medicine, said the collaboration with NVIDIA will be leveraged to explore new ways to connect computing breakthroughs to improved health outcomes for everyone.
“As a top-tier institution for the study of health sciences, it’s imperative that we continually educate our entire academic community on the best ways to optimize AI for the equitable study, prevention and treatment of disease,” Shekhar said. “We’re excited about the potential for this partnership to help us achieve this goal.”
While machine learning is often viewed as a newer discovery, Pitt has a long history of creating innovation in the learning sciences that is both interdisciplinary and conducted within research-practice partnerships. Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) is investigating how AI can improve student learning and has already established collaborative infrastructure for researchers from areas as diverse as business, law, psychology, education and computer science to study disciplinary differences in AI learning tech across these spaces.
“Pitt has extraordinary research strengths in life sciences and in learning sciences,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for research. “Our new NVIDIA partnership gives us access to state-of-the-art AI technologies applicable across the full spectrum of our world-leading ‘meds and eds’ research.”
Additional information regarding the AI Tech Community and NVIDIA’s Joint Center with the University of Pittsburgh for AI and Intelligent Systems can be found on NVIDIA’s blog.
Photography by Aimee Obidzinski