About
The Generative AI Center at UC Santa Cruz is a vibrant hub for research, collaboration, and education. We bring together the intellectual resources of faculty across many departments to take a comprehensive approach to research, education, and the practical application of Generative AI. Through this joint endeavor, we aspire to position UC Santa Cruz at the vanguard of Generative AI.
Our vision is anchored in three key pillars:
- Innovation and real-world impact: Driving breakthrough AI research and translating it into solutions with tangible societal impact, leveraging our unique position in the heart of Silicon Valley.
- Collaboration and accessible ecosystem: Building an open and inclusive AI ecosystem where academia, industry, and the broader community meet and collaborate.
- Trust, ethics and education for all: Advancing responsible AI grounded in ethics, while expanding opportunities through public education and outreach.
Together, these pillars reflect the UCSC GenAI Center’s unique identity: combining world-class research, our Silicon Valley location, and the mission of a public university—driving innovation, building inclusive ecosystems, and leading responsibly in the AI era.
Core GenAI innovations
The unprecedented innovation that Generative AI presents is revolutionizing fields beyond computer science. By enabling more interactive and natural interfaces for human-system interactions, Generative AI goes beyond textual inputs to incorporate multimodal systems. Our diverse faculty research expertise includes designing, building, and understanding generative AI models and applied generative AI. We are committed to advancing AI through bold and socially responsible innovation.
Applications
Our collaborations ensure our research remains relevant and responsive to real-world needs, providing practical applications to Generative AI innovations. Examples of applications include healthcare simulations and diagnostics, enhanced text-to-image generation and image recognition, and new hardware programming languages.
Policy & education
Our multidisciplinary approach provides a framework for developing ethical guidelines for implementation and utilization of Generative AI. We address these challenges by creating a collaborative hub for exploring, understanding, and shaping this evolving field with an emphasis on accountability, decision-making, and error-detection.