In early 2020, IU marked two important inaugurations that are witness to the university's prowess in all things cyber:
Pushing IT boundaries to advance health, security, more
Luddy Center for Artificial Intelligence
Ground was broken for the Luddy Center for Artificial Intelligence, which will feature state-of-the-art teaching and learning spaces for IU faculty and students conducting pioneering research in AI and machine learning, with a starting focus on digital health and medicine. A part of the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, the center was funded by a $60 million gift from IU alumnus Fred Luddy and is expected be an innovation hub amid the rapidly evolving world of AI, bolstering IU's strength in the field.
World-class supercomputing power supporting new discoveries, national defense
IU also inaugurated Big Red 200, a machine that is among the fastest academic supercomputers in the world. Its speed and superpower can be deployed to understand climate systems, advance artificial intelligence and machine learning investigations, and accelerate discoveries related to genetics and to diseases such as Alzheimer's.
Big Red 200 is also connected to the National Security Innovation Network, a first-of-its-kind warfare center that connects universities throughout Indiana to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, via a secure high-speed fiber network known as the I-Light network. NSIN gives collaborating researchers the ability to exchange and store huge data files, enabling contributions of innovative research, knowledge, and problem-solving expertise to advance national security and defense.
The human-technology frontier
Work settings of the future will likely feature human-technology partnerships, but will humans be augmented by technology or will technology be augmented by humans? The real question, says an IUPUI professor of biohealth informatics, is how people and AI can work together?
Human-machine "assemblages" are the focus of an IUPUI study, which will use radiologists' workflow to examine how human-machine partnerships may work best, possibly leading to reduced errors, improved accuracy, faster turn-around times, reduced fatigue, improved self-efficacy, and resilience.
The results of the study will illuminate how human work will change with the introduction of AI, and how people and AI can work better on any cognitive task when they are treated as one unit.
Saptarshi Purkayastha, an assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI, is leading the investigation, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Cybersecurity scholarship
To build the pipeline of talent that will continue using, and securing, tools such as Big Red 200 and NSIN, IU has launched a Cybersecurity Scholarship Program, supported by more than $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. The new initiative provides scholarships for 16 cybersecurity students over five years, after which the students will launch their cybersecurity careers in state or federal service.
This program joins a host of exceptional cybersecurity initiatives at IU including the groundbreaking M.S. in Cybersecurity Risk Management Program, a suite of cutting-edge cybersecurity educational opportunities offered by the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, and the rapidly developing expertise in cybersecurity and data governance at the Ostrom Workshop.