Please see a recent article about AI and how UB's involvment aims to help with various projects:
Here are two examples of work our faculty, Dr. Jeff Higginbotham and Dr. Alison Hendricks, are working on with faculty in engineering using AI to advance care for people with speech and language disorders.
AI for people with motor neuron diseases, mental health needs
Rohini Srihari, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, focuses on area of AI research known as personalization of large language models. This involves training models to learn the preferences and behaviors of users to fine-tune their experiences using chat bots.
She will leverage Empire AI to develop tools to ensure that people with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), cerebral palsy and other motor neuron diseases have equal access to AI. To do this, she is working with Jeffrey Higginbotham, PhD, professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, and other researchers to enrich augmentative and alternate communication devices with conversational AI.
Srihari also will employ Empire AI to help address the shortage of mental health professionals in the U.S., which is most severe in rural and underserved areas. She will develop personalized large language models to create conversational AI that mental health professionals can utilize to reach more people in need of care.
AI to assist children with speech/language challenges
Srirangaraj Setlur, principal research scientist at the UB Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors, will utilize Empire AI to build an agentic, multimodal large language model to perform real-time, interactive speech-language therapies for children with speech and language challenges. This model will be used by the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education and is designed to plan, deliver, and adapt interventions in real-time based on the child’s responses and scene dynamics.