Fortune magazine recently published an article on The new thing on campus: Why universities are appointing their first chief AI officers, now known as CAIOs.  In describing the trend, the article quoted the CAIOs from George Mason University, UCLA, the University of Utah, and UMBC, which appointed Professor Anupam Joshi as its Chief AI Officer and Vice Provost in June 2025. 

Joshi, who joined UMBC as an Assistant Professor in 1998, started working on AI and neural networks as a graduate student at Purdue in the early 1990s. His research has continued to use a broad range of evolving AI concepts and systems to a variety of problems in different application domains, including cybersecurity, healthcare, social media, pervasive computing systems, high-performance computing, and multi-agent systems.  Here’s an excerpt from the Fortune article.

“Anupam Joshi had served as CAIO for less than a month at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County when he spoke to Fortune. He shares that the school’s leadership had realized that AI had been generating excitement beyond the typical areas of computer and information science. … As he settles into his new work, Joshi says he’s exploring research partnerships that can be extended with companies like Google and Microsoft, while also listening to how professors want to utilize and teach AI. Many college professors are already using AI in their work, at times to the consternation of the students they teach. Joshi says teachers also tend to be a vocal crowd that isn’t shy about sharing their scholarly opinions.

“I think whoever comes into these kinds of roles needs to start with the position of humility,” says Joshi. “Because it’s one thing to do your own research in AI, trying to push the state of the art, and it’s another thing to use that as a tool to transform enterprises.”