AI at ICS: Making a Splash

2025 was a big year for artificial intelligence, and nowhere more so than at ICS. As well as establishing an endowed chair for AI, we furthered our research across the full spectrum of AI-related technologies, from core algorithms and AI for software engineering to human-computer interaction and a broad range of application domains, both within the school and in partnership with our interdisciplinary centers. Here we take a look at ICS’ contributions to the foundations of AI, the questions we must ask ourselves as we grapple with the breakneck speed and broad impact of AI advances, and the work we are doing to prepare our students to be at the forefront of AI innovation as they become tomorrow’s tech leaders.

The Inaugural Hasso Plattner Endowed Chair in AI Public Lecture

Both ICS’ history and aspirations were the subject of a public lecture that took place on June 3, to celebrate the appointment of Professor Padhraic Smyth as the inaugural Hasso Plattner Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence at UC Irvine. The chair was established following a $2 million gift to the university from SAP SE, the world’s largest vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and business AI software, and was named after SAP’s co-founder.

Hosted by ICS Dean Marios Papaefthymiou, the event was held at Beall Applied Innovation on the UC Irvine campus. Dean Papaefthymiou welcomed leadership from SAP’s offices in Newport Beach, Silicon Valley and Europe and members of the UC Irvine community, including faculty, staff, students and alumni.

“I had the privilege of meeting Hasso Plattner in person in September 2019, during the grand opening of SAP’s offices in Newport Beach,” Dean Papaefthymiou commented. “A striking statement he made during his public remarks was that one of the reasons that SAP opened its office in Newport Beach was proximity to the UC Irvine campus and its excellent research program in artificial intelligence.”

Deep-Rooted Foundation

Professor Smyth began his lecture, titled “A Personal Perspective on AI: Past, Present and Future,” by advising caution about trying to predict the future of AI, an endeavor which is often incorrect and overpromised. He focused on how we got to where we are and the current reality of AI, in order to learn from the past, responsibly manage the present and optimize the future. Smyth grouped the advent of AI into four components:

• Foundational Concepts (mid-1800s to1940s)
• First Wave – 1950s to 1970s – Early Efforts in Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning
• Second Wave – 1980s to 2010 – Rule-based Systems and Neural Networks
• Third Wave – 2010 to present – Deep Learning Coming to the Forefront

As the first standalone school of computing in the University of California system and one of the first in the nation, it is not surprising that ICS has an early connection to AI. Smyth highlighted some key milestones.

• ICS led the conversation about public benchmark datasets and their significance in developing fair and effective AI algorithms decades before it assumed its current prominence. The UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository created by ICS Ph.D. student David Aha in 1987 has been widely used by students, educators and researchers around the world, providing a common foundation for researchers to develop and compare their technologies. Over the years it has become an invaluable resource for the research community worldwide and continues to grow today with new types of datasets.
•  ICS was one of the first institutions to create forums for disseminating machine learning research, with Professor Pat Langley editing the first issue of the Journal of Machine Learning in 1986 and UC Irvine hosting the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in 1987.
• The Imagenet dataset and competition in the late 2000s, with 10 million images, developed by Alex Berg (now at UC Irvine) and colleagues, was another landmark large dataset in machine learning.
• The Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, established in the early 2000s by Prof. Pierre Baldi, was a leading research center exploring the application of AI to genomics, catalyzing a revolution in the understanding of biological genes, proteins, networks, and systems, and their medical implications.

Asking the Right Questions

Smyth used examples to show how both AI and humans are often overconfident in AI’s ability to solve complex problems, failing to recognize the limitations of the data sets that AI models were trained on and the systems’ inability to follow commonsense principles.

He concluded that AI is extremely useful but it’s important to be aware of its limitations and resist the hype. He encouraged his audience to remember the history of AI and to ask the right questions.

“AI is broader than deep learning, and you owe it to yourselves to educate yourselves more broadly about other aspects of AI and think not just about the technical aspects but the societal implications,” Smyth said.

“We shouldn’t just be asking can we do this with AI, but why are we doing this with AI. What is the long-term goal here?”

Flowing into the Future

AI is interwoven throughout the ICS curriculum: existing courses have been revised and new courses introduced to capture the evolving AI landscape, including new courses on building and managing AI systems. Courses launched in AY 2025-26 range from the introductory general-education level (e.g., ICS8–AI and Society), designed to appeal to a broad audience, to advanced upper-level electives (e.g., INF119–Engineering AI Software), aimed at ICS majors.

“Excellence in research informs education, and we teach both the foundations of AI as well as ways of using AI effectively toward a range of software development tasks,” says Andre van der Hoek, informatics professor and associate dean for academic affairs. “We position our students to understand where the field has come from and where it might go, and how they can best prepare themselves for their future careers. We teach critical thinking rather than just a static skill set, so that they understand how to build and adapt to systems rather than just operate them. We do all of this with a sense of responsibility, ethics and commitment to social good.”

What does this mean for graduate job-seekers? Van der Hoek says, “Companies want to bring in young people who know how the tools work and know how to assess the AI-generated code and make it work with the existing codebase seamlessly and, especially, without introducing problems. AI code isn’t perfect. People have to be able to tinker and fix it.”

Thomas Zimmermann, Chancellor’s Professor and Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Science, says, “AI can take on repetitive or routine tasks, but higher-level work still depends on human judgment. Creativity, innovation, and critical thinking are more important than ever in particular when it comes to design, code review, and ensuring the quality of complex systems.” Zimmermann emphasizes that students preparing for an AI-driven future should begin by embracing new technologies rather than fearing them. He adds, “In our classes, we’re rethinking how we teach the foundations. We are now teaching how to build AI systems because it’s not just about having familiarity with AI tools. The toolbelt of the software engineer is expanding, and AI is becoming a core instrument alongside traditional skills.”

Iftekhar Ahmed, associate professor of informatics, breaks down the ways ICS researchers are working with AI: by understanding, analyzing, predicting, building, educating and reinventing. “At ICS, we are transforming research into impact, developing new algorithms, applying AI in practice, and exploring long-term effects of AI on society,” he says.

Interdisciplinary approaches are a true strength of ICS. “AI is connected to everything – and soon nothing will remain untouched by it,” says Zimmermann. “At ICS, we have expertise across both the technical and human dimensions of AI. We’re not just advancing algorithms. We’re exploring how AI intersects with people, systems, and society.

This interdisciplinary strength is what made me come to UC Irvine. It creates real opportunities for innovation and synergy.” He adds, “AI is rapidly changing the way that we build software. But no matter how advanced the tools become, human oversight will always be necessary to guide design decisions and ensure responsible outcomes.”

AI Research at ICS

• Core AI
  Automated reasoning, machine learning, generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing
• Human-centered attributes of AI
  Explainability, ethics, trust
• Application domains
  Society/AI interaction, physical AI, software engineering, security and privacy, and systems

ICS Centers Conducting AI Research

• AI in Science Institute
• Center for Embedded and Cyberphysical Systems
• Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems
• Center for Responsible, Ethical and Accessible Tech
• Connected Learning Lab
• HPI Research Center in ML and DS
• Institute for Future Health
• Institute for Software Research
• UCI Machine Learning Repository