The Artificial Intelligence Institute of UofSC (AIISC)

The Artificial Intelligence Institute of UofSC (AIISC) resulted in the university-wide excellence initiative. It started with Prof. Amit Sheth, moving as the founding director, with his initial team in 2019. It has rapidly grown to over 25 researchers, with the joining of Prof. Biplav Srivastava, Forest Agostinelli, and Qi Zhang in 2020. As a university-wide institute, it already has collaborations with a majority of the colleges on the campus.

AIISC seeks to be a leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications, starting with the US Southeast. In addition to several core research areas in AI, it supports comprehensive interdisciplinary and translational research in AI across the university, and support workforce and economic development in the state through education, technology, and commercialization. Activities of the AIISC include:

  • Carry out highly competitive, world-class research in AI in core AI topics and in interdisciplinary AI
  • Develop AI education and workforce development through
    1. Additional AI courses,
    2. Certificate and degree program in AI (may include core and/or interdisciplinary AI)
    3. Interdisciplinary AI training targeted at workforce development (e.g., use of AI in education technology, AI in smart manufacturing/factory of future with a focus on creating a workforce for South Carolina)
  • Economic development with patents ,SBIR/STTR, collaborative industry project, licensing/tech transfer and commercialization
  • Social Development with projects in social good and health (personalized/public health).


The AIISC is located on the top floor of just renovated Science and Technology Building. It has a beautiful work environment that is ideal for collaborative research, comparable to the best startups (e.g., a kitchen with an espresso machine, various formal and informal seating spaces, 50 person seminar room, conference room, quiet room, and more) with a 5-minute walk to our beautiful horseshoe (history, now), and a world-class computing resources (e.g., the latest Nvidia 8xA100 Tensor core based GPU cluster with 5 petaFLOPS AI, 10 petaOPS INT8).