BU Today: Boston University Ramps Up Strategy on AI
Excerpt from BU Today | By: Molly Callahan | April 10, 2025 | Photo: iStock
Artificial intelligence is reshaping broad swaths of life so fast that it can feel impossible to keep up. Everything from education to weather forecasting, from virtual personal assistants to preventive healthcare, from financial trading to social media now incorporates AI in some form. It’s becoming clearer by the day that the future of work and learning will require at least some AI literacy—if not fluency.
Positioning itself to be at the forefront of this revolution, Boston University is creating what it’s calling the Artificial Intelligence Development Accelerator (AIDA) for Academic and Administrative Excellence, an initiative designed to coalesce the long-standing and widespread investment in—and experimentation with—AI at BU. (A new website for AIDA can be found here.)
“Over the past three years, artificial intelligence, and particularly generative AI, has matured at an unprecedented pace,” BU President Melissa Gilliam said at a recent University symposium on generative AI. “And so it’s no longer a distant future—AI is the current reality that is reshaping industries and communities, and the way we understand and interact with the world. And the implications for us as educators, scholars, researchers, administrative staff, learners, and people are quite significant.
“There are pivotal moments where we can embrace change, where we have to envision a future and create an environment that nurtures innovation and progress, and today, we are at such a moment, and we have decided to act boldly,” Gilliam told the standing-room-only crowd of faculty, staff, and researchers from across the University.
Across BU, faculty and staff are experimenting with AI as a classroom tool and a means for making sometimes tedious administrative tasks more efficient. This means that BU’s approach to AI cannot be one-size-fits-all, says Azer Bestavros, associate provost for computing and data sciences, and part of the inaugural governing board for AIDA.
“I really like the last letter in AIDA, which stands for ‘Accelerator.’ AIDA is all about accelerating what we know is going to happen,” says Bestavros, who is also a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and the founding director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.