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Excerpt from BU Today | By: Molly Callahan | April 10,<\/span>\u00a02025\u00a0| <\/span>Photo: iStock<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence is reshaping broad swaths of life so fast that it can feel impossible to keep up. Everything from education to weather forecasting, from virtual personal assistants to preventive healthcare, from financial trading to social media now incorporates AI in some form. It\u2019s becoming clearer by the day that the future of work and learning will require at least some AI literacy\u2014if not fluency.<\/p>\n Positioning itself to be at the forefront of this revolution, Boston University is creating what it\u2019s calling the Artificial Intelligence Development Accelerator (AIDA)<\/a> for Academic and Administrative Excellence, an initiative designed to coalesce the long-standing and widespread investment in\u2014and experimentation with\u2014AI at BU. (A new website for AIDA can be found here.)<\/p>\n \u201cOver the past three years, artificial intelligence, and particularly generative AI, has matured at an unprecedented pace,\u201d BU President Melissa Gilliam said at a recent University symposium on generative AI. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s no longer a distant future\u2014AI is the current reality that is reshaping industries and communities, and the way we understand and interact with the world. And the implications for us as educators, scholars, researchers, administrative staff, learners, and people are quite significant.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are pivotal moments where we can embrace change, where we have to envision a future and create an environment that nurtures innovation and progress, and today, we are at such a moment, and we have decided to act boldly,\u201d Gilliam told the standing-room-only crowd of faculty, staff, and researchers from across the University.<\/p>\n Across BU, faculty and staff are experimenting with AI as a classroom tool and a means for making sometimes tedious administrative tasks more efficient. This means that BU\u2019s approach to AI cannot be one-size-fits-all, says Azer Bestavros<\/a>, associate provost for computing and data sciences, and part of the inaugural governing board for AIDA.<\/p>\n \u201cI really like the last letter in AIDA, which stands for \u2018Accelerator.\u2019 AIDA is all about accelerating what we know is going to happen,\u201d says Bestavros, who is also a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and the founding director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.<\/p>\n