Professor Alina Zare, Ph.D., director of UF’s Artificial Intelligence and Informatics Research Institute, was named the inaugural Malachowsky Family Endowed Professor. The role will enhance her research and mentorships.

Read more about Three ECE Faculty Members Awarded New Malachowsky Professorships

The event marks the latest milestone in the university’s artificial intelligence initiative, which began in 2020 and serves as a national model for harnessing AI to build America’s future workforce and boost the country’s national competitiveness.

Elias G. Eldayrie, senior vice president and chief information officer, welcomed more than 125 guests to the ceremony, including representatives from UF’s Board of Trustees and cabinet, NVIDIA and U.S. Representative Kat Cammack.

Read more about University of Florida Unveils Fastest Supercomputer in Higher Education.

The milestone will come six months after the UF Board of Trustees approved investing in the machine, which will accelerate projects in areas from environmental research to medicine and bring the most cutting-edge generative AI capabilities to UF research. With the latest model, UF is on target to be the first university in U.S. higher education with an NVIDIA DGX B200 SuperPOD supercomputer, powered by NVIDIA’s Blackwell graphics processing units, or GPUs.

The $24 million acquisition of the NVIDIA DGX systems is a highly anticipated step in a long-standing engagement between the two organizations that has resulted in a comprehensive push to integrate AI education and research across every academic discipline at UF.  

Far from the high-profile tech hubs on the West Coast, a college town in north Florida’s swamplands is pushing forward to distinguish itself as an AI research destination.

Last month, the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees approved a $24 million investment to upgrade UF’s supercomputer, HiPerGator. When NVIDIA, the AI computing company that built the machine, delivers the fourth-generation model to campus later this year, it will make Gainesville the home of one of the globe’s fastest supercomputers amid an international AI arms race.

NVIDIA — co-founded by UF alumnus Chris Malachowsky — is expected to deliver the machine to the Gainesville campus during the first half of next year. HiPerGator, the AI supercomputer, was brought to UF in 2021 as the fastest of its kind in higher education at the time (and it still is today). 

The program is a collaboration between UF Research, UF Research Computing and NVIDIA, which together are providing $2.4 million in seed funding and in-kind computer time and consulting for students, post-docs and faculty working on specific projects.

“This program is to help faculty who need access to hundreds of GPUs to perform analysis on billions of pieces of data,” said David Norton, UF’s vice president for research. “These projects are expected to open up whole new avenues of artificial intelligence research and position the researchers to pursue other large external grants.”

In this proof-of-concept study, physicians reviewed patient notes — some written by actual medical doctors while others were created by the new AI program — and the physicians identified the correct author only 49% of the time.

A team of 19 researchers from NVIDIA and the University of Florida said their findings, published Nov. 16 in the Nature journal npj Digital Medicine, open the door for AI to support health care workers with groundbreaking efficiencies.

The new AI program, GatorTronGPT, which is modeled after ChatGPT, runs on UF’s HiPerGator supercomputer. GatorTronGPT, which was created by researchers like Yonghui Wu, Ph.D., from the UF College of Medicine’s department of health outcomes and biomedical informatics, opens the door for AI to support health care workers.

The next generation of super-smart computers, tablets, and cell phones may come equipped with artificial intelligence-generated medical chatbots that can interact with patients using human language and medical knowledge.

According to Yonghui Wu, Ph.D., director of natural language processing at the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the medical chatbot you interact with online will be able to use conversational language to communicate with and educate patients in much the same way we now interact with Apple’s chatbot, Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa.

Agriculture Intelligence is focused on bringing advanced computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence solutions to the field of agriculture. The company’s flagship product, Agroview, is an advanced technology licensed from the University of Florida that uses aerial (UAV) and ground data to provide critical agriculture details including: full inventory, missing inventory, plant health metrics (exact height, canopy size, leaf density, and health and age assessment), full-field fertility mapping and nutrient analysis, and full-field fruit count and measurement. The company focus is to develop, market, sell, and support specialty crop growers, starting with citrus.

“It is an honor to join NVIDIA Inception,” said Agriculture Intelligence CEO Matthew Donovan. “NVIDIA is recognized as a world-class organization and a global leader in cloud-based technologies. Being part of NVIDIA Inception will accelerate our flagship platform, Agroview, which is a groundbreaking cloud-based solution and the beginning of the fourth revolution in agriculture. We are excited about this collaboration. The future is very bright.”

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