Artificial Intelligence

University of Michigan Engineers are at the forefront of advancing artificial intelligence, from its core enabling technologies to impactful, interdisciplinary applications that address today’s complex challenges. Our pioneering research and education builds on longstanding leadership that goes back to the dawn of the information age.

With the Michigan AI Lab as the foundation, our faculty continue to advance the models that underpin all AI technology, including generative AI, machine-learning and deep-learning models that uncover patterns in complex data, as well as the computer-vision and natural language models that serve as the “brains” of robots that can learn from people and adapt to new situations.

Faculty at University of Michigan Engineering have been at the forefront of machine learning and artificial intelligence research, and our graduates and professors started several research fields that served as the foundation for modern artificial intelligence. Claude Shannon, who graduated from Michigan Engineering in 1936, started the field of information theory and became widely known as the “father of the information age.” Professor John Holland developed genetic algorithms and learning classifier tools—two tools that are now the current standard for machine learning and computational science. His 1975 book, titled “Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems,” remains one of the most frequently cited works on artificial intelligence. Computer chips have the power required to train today’s massive AI models, thanks to the very large-scale integration technology developed by Professor Lynn Conway around the same time as Holland’s book.

We continued to advance the field with the founding of the Michigan AI Lab in 1988. The lab started as a collection of faculty interested in computer vision, but by the ’90s, the lab had attracted a critical mass of researchers working on several major problems in AI. It was one of the larger AI labs at the time, and it explored some of the broadest research avenues.

Several active researchers in the AI Lab and throughout Michigan Engineering are currently among the top one percent of the world’s most cited computer scientists. Michigan Engineering has also trained students that are now world leaders in AI research today, including Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, Jordi Ribas, the Corporate Vice President of Search & AI at Microsoft, Peter Wurman, who co-founded the company that became Amazon Robotics, and Kunle Olukotun, a Stanford professor and founder of SambaNova—a company developing some of the fastest AI chips and inference servers.