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Stanford Merging AI and Data Science Institute

Stanford University is merging its two flagship AI and data science organizations into a single institute, to be led by computer scientist James Landay&period; [Photo above&colon; James Landay by Andrew Brodhead]&NewLine;The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the Stanford Data Science initiative will combine under the Stanford HAI name, with Landay continuing as Denning Director&period; University leaders believe the human-centered focus is critical to the future of technology&period; It is reflected in the broad sweep of faculty involved – from engineering to medicine to the humanities and more&period;&NewLine;Former Stanford president John Hennessy and HAI founding director Fei-Fei Li will serve as co-chairs of the institute’s advisory council&period; Li will also take on a new university-wide role as Special Advisor on AI to President Jonathan Levin&period; Hennessy is Chairman of the Board of Alphabet Inc&period;&NewLine;The merger combines HAI’s network of more than 400 scholars, extensive industry affiliates program, and &dollar;60 million in cumulative grant funding with Stanford Data Science’s high-performance Marlowe computing cluster and early scholar fellowship program&period; Levin describes the new Stanford HAI as &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;the front door for AI at Stanford&period;”&NewLine;Much of that capacity has been built through donor investment – endowed professorships, the Data Science Scholars program and the HAI Graduate Fellowship program that train early-career researchers, and seed and scale-up research grants funding projects across the university&period;&NewLine;&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;The merged organization creates a community of scholars whose research touches powerfully on every aspect of AI, its applications, and implications,” Levin said, &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;and the human-centered focus provides a north star for the institute&period;”&NewLine;Landay has spent three decades working in what’s now called human-centered computing&period; His 1990s design software SILK foreshadowed tools like Figma and Canva&semi; his UbiFit project in the early 2000s anticipated the Fitbit and Apple Watch&period; In 2024, he received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award&period;&NewLine;&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;This technology is changing everything,” said Landay, who is also the Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Professor in the School of Engineering&period; &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;To have real impact in this moment, we need to adapt&period; This is about shaping how AI affects people, communities, and society – with that human-centered perspective at the core of everything we do&period;”&NewLine;

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