The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Data Science Institution will invest in artificial intelligence through their Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) program to improve studies around the new technology
This new initiative, called “RISE-AI,” already hired 35 employees and current staff, students and faculty. They aim to “become the guides for society” in navigating the rapidly-changing world of AI, conducting research about AI’s uses to explore issues relating to medicine, agriculture and communications.
RISE-AI will be just one branch — and the first focus — of the larger RISE program. RISE was launched in early 2024 as a program designed to approach complex issues relating to Wisconsin and the world through faculty hiring, infrastructure enhancement, interdisciplinary collaboration and increased educational opportunities.
The RISE program will also focus on contributing to sustainability initiatives (RISE-EARTH), which the university called “the most comprehensive environmental sustainability initiative in UW-Madison history,” and research to improve the human life span (RISE-THRIVE).
DSI Director Kyle Cranmer leads the RISE-AI program. To him, faculty members at UW-Madison are the perfect people to head these types of research initiatives.
“[AI is] such a cross cutting topic,” Cranmer said. “It requires experts, both at the level of computer scientists and also people that are thinking about energy and water use of data centers, ethics and privacy and applications and areas ranging from health to agriculture. UW really has the breadth to be able to address all of those things.”
Cranmer said he hopes RISE-AI can add to recent research success — like the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024, where Hassabis Jumper created an AI model to predict the structure of complex proteins — using UW-Madison’s world-leading facilities, strong science departments and willingness to be experimental.
Through RISE-AI, Cranmer has already begun his own research on particle physics and foundational work related to AI through the lens of a physicist. Instead of working with real world data, Cranmer said they’ve generated synthetic data sets to use as benchmarks to test AI systems.
Cranmer hopes RISE-AI will help bring focus on drug discovery and structural biology while also researching non-STEM topics like AI ethics.
“The RISE-AI initiative is one of the most visible things that UW is doing, and there's not many other universities standing up, [with] either centers or departments and various things related to AI,” he said. “But also with RISE-AI, the extent of the new hiring piece of it is not all in computer science. It's distributed across the university, which really recognizes how AI impacts essentially almost every, or could impact almost every area, and I think that's very promising.”
Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin also touted the RISE initiative as an interdisciplinary approach to upholding the Wisconsin Idea.
“Problems aren’t confined to a single discipline, nor can the solutions be,” she said in a statement. “Audacious, interdisciplinary inquiry leading to groundbreaking discovery and education is what Wisconsin RISE is intended to spark.”
In the world of science research, though, many have faced recent difficulties. Funding cuts have been felt across the country, and at UW-Madison alone, several federal research grants have been stopped. Cranmer is optimistic, however, that RISE-AI, in partnership with American Family Insurance and with $15 million donated by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, can ride the current AI wave into success.
“AI is one of the areas there seems to be a lot of interest in,” he said. “Sometimes it's very specific, and sometimes it's wrapped into AI as it applies to some other area, whether it be energy or medicine. And so I think many of the funding opportunities have a kind of AI element now.”
Sports editor emeritus Shane Colpoys contributed reporting to this article.
