Davis Institute for Artificial IntelligenceColby College announced Thursday the creation of the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a new academic program that it expects will make the Waterville campus a prominent center for the teaching and research of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The Davis Institute will be the country’s first cross-disciplinary institute for artificial intelligence at a liberal arts college, according to a news release from the school.

In an email to alumni, David Greene, the school’s president, said the new institute will allow “faculty and students to reimagine a liberal arts education for this century and beyond.”

“The Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence … will ensure that Colby students across the disciplines will have rich technical expertise while being deeply educated in the liberal arts, thereby possessing the powers of discernment to shape AI for the greater good,” Greene said.

The institute is being founded with the help of a $30 million gift from the the Davis family and Andrew Davis, a trustee of the family’s charitable foundation and a Colby alumnus (class of 1985).

The new institute’s webpage opens with the bold claim that “Silicon Valley needs a breath of fresh Maine air.”

The school’s goal is for the institute to become a national, if not global, center for cross-disciplinary research into artificial intelligence and how it’s applied ethically across a growing array of industries. The institute’s areas of focus will include economics and finance, computational social sciences (i.e., “examining the human condition through artificial intelligence”), biology, bioinformatics, genomics, environmental studies, oceanography, and ethics.

In a video posted on the institute’s webpage, a narrator shares the school’s vision of what the institute will become: “The world’s most respected scholars and researchers will convene in Waterville, working with Colby students to analyze these issues and develop solutions. We’ve always dared to create new knowledge and solve problems. Now we’ll be the college others turn to for smart, sensible, and ethical AI.”

The Davis Institute, which will open this fall following a national search for a founding director, will hire an initial cohort of six new faculty experts in artificial intelligence in different disciplines, ranging from computer science and genomics to sociology and English literature.

“The Davis Institute will enable our faculty to transform their scholarship and teaching,” Margaret McFadden, provost and dean of faculty at Colby, said in a statement. “AI is driving very dramatic shifts in virtually every area of inquiry. These shifts will have profound consequences for quantitative research and teaching across the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities and ultimately offer new routes to discovery. Our educational mission must include preparing students for a future in which AI is ubiquitous, and this Institute will make that possible in a way that no other liberal arts college can do.”

Colby’s announcement comes a year after Northeastern University announced its creation in Portland of the Roux Institute, a high-tech graduate education and research institute that also has artificial intelligence as one of its focuses.

This is not the first gift the Davis family has provided Colby. With Andrew Davis’s support, his family provided a $25 million gift in 2017 to create DavisConnects, Colby’s model for post-graduate success, as well as a $10 million lead gift in 2013 to construct the Davis Science Center on Colby’s campus.

“Their newest investment in Colby might just turn out to be the most transformative of all,” Greene said.

 

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