Throughline
Spotlight on Artificial Intelligence

Undergraduate Study: Exploring AI Foundations
Engineering undergraduates are deeply engaged in AI through a range of initiatives. Courses like “Artificial Intelligence” taught by Professor Devika Subramanian offer students comprehensive insights into both the foundations and applications of AI. Through workshops and research projects, students gain hands-on experience with AI technologies. This multifaceted approach not only equips students with valuable skills but also fosters a deep understanding of AI’s potential impact across industries. Rice engineers have gone on to hold AI-focused roles after graduation or launch their own startups, like Rakesh Agrawal ’98, founder of SnapStream.

Graduate Research: Advancing Healthcare with AI
Harnessing the capability of AI, graduate students are solving complex problems to make healthcare more accessible and effective for communities worldwide. A team of doctoral students has the potential to revolutionize patient-trial matching, a critical aspect of medical research, using a large language model coupled with AI deep learning. This approach, unlike previous attempts that used either a simple algorithm or a deep learning model independently, trains the system on large amounts of data and teaches it how to best match patients with the right medical trials. Another graduate student-led team of researchers has developed a tool that is better at integrating single-cell DNA and RNA data than more recent, state-of-the-art technologies. The findings could lead to better early-stage cancer detection.

Industry Partners: Influencing National and Global AI Policy
Rice Engineering faculty are lending their expertise to drive national and international collaboration and ensure the ethical development of artificial intelligence technologies. Rice has joined the nation’s leading artificial intelligence stakeholders to participate in a Department of Commerce initiative to support the development and deployment of trustworthy and safe AI. The Ken Kennedy Institute, which supports research on AI, data, and computing to solve global challenges, is leading the effort. From the international perspective, Rice engineers Rodrigo Ferreira and César A. Uribe weighed in at a public hearing of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC) on the risks, opportunities, and potential ways to leverage artificial intelligence as an arena for collaboration between the U.S.
and Latin America.