AIM Welcomes 5 Distinguished Artificial Intelligence Scholars

The University of Maryland on Thursday announced five leading experts from a diverse array of disciplines as its first cohort of core faculty of the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM), UMD’s hub for AI collaboration across campus. 

Ilaria Canavotto, Yu Gan, Ritwik Gupta, Yulin Hswen and Swati Srivastava join UMD’s more than 200 AI scholars across every school and college. Collectively, they exemplify AIM’s mission to integrate state-of-the-art AI innovation with rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship to advance meaningful and lasting societal impact and prepare UMD students to succeed in an AI-infused workforce.

“In our rapidly changing world, we have a responsibility to provide opportunities for students across every field to understand, use and shape artificial intelligence in responsible and ethical ways,” said Jennifer King Rice, senior vice president and provost. “By engaging students, faculty and researchers across the curriculum, we’re offering graduates the tools to apply AI thoughtfully, and building a university-wide ecosystem of AI innovation and excellence that drives meaningful impact.”

The five scholars strengthen UMD’s leadership both in foundational technical areas of AI such as computer vision and perception, game theory, reasoning and agentic AI, and in social and humanistic areas. They also deepen AIM’s work across the institute’s four core pillars: accessibility, learning, sustainability and social justice. AIM faculty will serve as AI leaders across campus and will teach courses for AIM’s degree programs. 

“This inaugural cohort of core faculty marks a major milestone for AIM,” said Hal Daumé, AIM director and Volpi-Cupal Endowed Professor of Computer Science. “Individually, each conducts research that deeply impacts the practice of AI, through an interdisciplinary lens. And collectively, their expertise expands our capacity to pursue ambitious, interdisciplinary AI research, together with the AI expertise already on campus.”

AIM’s inaugural cohort of core faculty includes:

• Ilaria Canavotto, who joined the Department of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Humanities in Fall 2025 as an assistant professor, following a postdoctoral research position at UMD since 2021. Her research lies at the intersection of logic, artificial intelligence and law, with additional interests in social choice theory, game and decision theory and metaphysics. She investigates how formal models from these fields can improve our understanding of decision-making in AI systems and legal contexts.
   
• Yu Gan, who will join the Fischell Department of Bioengineering in the A. James Clark School of Engineering this summer as an associate professor. Gan is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. His research focuses on biomedical image analysis, generative AI, agentic AI, computer vision, bioimaging and explainable machine learning for health care applications.
   
• Ritwik Gupta, who will join the Department of Computer Science in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences as an assistant professor this summer. Gupta is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies perception, reasoning and decision-making in complex environments. His work combines computer vision, machine learning and physics-based modeling to address challenges in climate science, humanitarian response and national security.
   
• Yulin Hswen, who joined the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Public Health in January as an associate professor. Previously, Hswen was an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and a core faculty member of the Computational Precision Health Program at UC Berkeley. She leverages artificial intelligence, machine learning and social media analytics to study how digital narratives spread, influence behavior and impact public health outcomes. Her work addresses the ethics and equity of AI in medicine, the dissemination of misinformation and health disparity dynamics online.
   
• Swati Srivastava, who will join the Department of Government and Politics in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences this summer as an associate professor. Srivastava is an associate professor of political science and University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. She also holds positions as faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and non-resident scholar in digital futures at New America. Her research focuses on private power in global governance and the emerging politics of Big Tech and AI.

In the past five years, faculty at UMD have collectively published more than 1,300 papers in the field of AI, been awarded over $160 million in AI-related research grants and contributed to more than 15 UMD-based AI-related centers. During the 2024-25 academic year, the university taught more than 17,000 student-credit hours of AI-related courses. It offers multiple master's programs in AI and will be launching Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees in the coming year. 

U.S. News & World Report ranks UMD in the top 10 among public institutions for artificial intelligence, and CSRankings.org places it at No. 3 among all U.S. universities in artificial intelligence based on publications from the last five years.

To learn more about AIM, visit aim.umd.edu.