Campaign Initiatives

Computing and AI

Push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and machine learning, advancing scholarship across science, engineering, and the humanities to deepen knowledge and discovery in a new era of thinking.

Thinking with, about, and without machines

What if the question isn’t what AI can do, but what humans choose to do with it?

We’re answering that question in one of the most ambitious intellectual bets in the University’s history. UChicago faculty and students are thinking with machines—using AI to hunt undruggable cancer proteins and read ancient civilizations through digital archives no human could survey alone. They are thinking about machines—asking whether AI can genuinely create, and whether it is quietly redrawing the boundary between governments and the people they govern. And they are thinking without machines—insisting that human judgment and inquiry are not optional.

When over 400 faculty responded to an open call for AI research ideas, they came from archaeology, astrophysics, chemistry, law, medicine, economics, the arts, and beyond—all to explore what intelligent inquiry means in the age of AI. They were doing what Chicago Minds have always done: following the question wherever it leads, even when it leads somewhere no discipline has mapped before.

The work ahead will define how intelligent systems shape human life for generations.

Numbers at a Glance

10 inaugural AI research areas, spanning every school and division on campus
$50 million gift from Trustee Rika Mansueto, AB’91, and Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80, launching a challenge to fund 20 endowed faculty chairs
6,000 combined undergraduate enrollments in computer science and data science

Fueled By Your Support

Endowed Professorships: The scholars and practitioners who will define how AI develops—and how humanity navigates that development—are being recruited right now. Endowed professorships are powerful recruitment tools to bring them to UChicago, creating a lasting home for courageous, cross-disciplinary inquiry in artificial intelligence and computation.
Start-up Packages and Compute Infrastructure: Computation-driven research is only as powerful as the infrastructure behind it. Start-up packages give newly recruited faculty the technical resources to do ambitious work from day one.
Flexible Research Support: Flexible, expendable funding ensures that when a new research opportunity in this rapidly evolving area emerges, UChicago is ready to seed collaborations, support pilot studies, and sustain exploratory, early-stage work.
Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Fellowships: How will a new generation of “bilingual” scholars—fluent in a domain like law, biology, or economics, and equally fluent in the computational methods reshaping it—be funded? Fellowship support gives these emerging researchers the freedom to follow their own questions and do the kind of courageous, boundary-crossing work that defines a Chicago mind.
Educational Programming: Support for cross-disciplinary AI education funds the courses, programs, and pedagogical experiments that will define what it means to be an educated person in the age of intelligent machines, equipped to think with, about, and without them.

Contact

Matt Leroux
773.834.8943
leroux@uchicago.edu

Computing and AI

Thinking with, about, and without machines

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