Advancing ALS Care, Medical Imaging, and Mental Health – All WNY

Projects showcase UB’s commitment to harnessing AI for the public good

BUFFALO — University at Buffalo researchers are tapping the incredible power of Empire AI.

The $400 million statewide consortium – which Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last year, including its supercomputing center located at UB, a State University of New York flagship with decades of leadership in AI and data science – aims to harness AI for the betterment of society and drive innovation in New York State.

With the initial phase of Empire AI up and running, select UB researchers are employing the center’s powerful computers to develop technology that aims to ease the nation’s shortage of mental health professionals, improve medical imaging, and assist people with motor neuron diseases like ALS, amongst other efforts.

“At UB, we are committed to technological innovation for the betterment of society. These projects will ensure our researchers continue to break barriers in artificial intelligence that ultimately improve the quality of life of countless individuals while also creating economic opportunities in Buffalo and beyond,” said Venu Govindaraju, UB vice president for research and economic development.

The projects are among the first for Empire AI, which consists of fellow SUNY schools, the City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Flatiron Institute, and the Simons Foundation.

Here’s a closer look at the first wave of UB projects made possible by Empire AI.

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-enhanced medical imaging

Scott Doyle, associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, will employ Empire AI’s computing power to create an AI tool that helps doctors better diagnose and monitor diseases. It will generate biomedical images by combining pathology reports with image-generating AI models that are trained on medical scans. The tool could lead to more sophisticated models that integrate genetic data with medical imaging.

AI to study protein structures

Thomas Grant, assistant professor in the Department of Structural Biology, is developing an AI model (SWAXSFold) to improve AlphaFold, a celebrated AI program that predicts the structure of proteins and could lead to the development of new drugs to treat diseases. AlphaFold struggles to consider how proteins change shape due to pH, temperature and other conditions. Empire AI’s computing capacity enables SWAXSFold to address this limitation by using experimental data to predict how proteins look in these environments.

AI to further drug discovery

Ram Samudrala, professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, is creating a model (CANDO) that uses AI to analyze billions of interactions between molecules. He is working with Zackary Falls, assistant professor, also in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. CANDO’s development will be greatly aided by Empire AI. Its primary goal is to help identify new medicines to treat diseases, however, other potential applications include new research probes, reagents, detergents, pesticides, sensors and more.

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.

Projects build upon UB’s AI expertise

The projects will build upon UB’s expertise in AI, which includes pioneering work creating the world’s first autonomous handwriting recognition system, which the U.S. Postal Service and Royal Mail adopted to save billions of dollars.

“With Empire AI operational, this is an incredibly exciting time to be conducting AI research in New York State. We now have access to computing power that has mostly been available only to private companies. This will help level the playing field and lead to life-changing new discoveries,” said Srihari.

The University at Buffalo has been a worldwide leader in artificial intelligence research and education for nearly 50 years. This includes pioneering work creating the world’s first autonomous handwriting recognition system, which the U.S. Postal Service and Royal Mail adopted in the 1990s to save billions of dollars. As New York’s flagship university, that legacy of innovation continues today. More than 200 UB researchers are using AI for social good, including developing new AI-powered technology and ideas that tackle pressing societal challenges in education, health care, sustainability and other areas.

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Empire AI at UB: Advancing ALS Care, Medical Imaging, and Mental Health