Renu Balyan, an assistant professor of computer and information sciences at SUNY Old Westbury, is among a select group of faculty members across the State University of New York to be asked to serve in the inaugural class of system’s AI for the Public Good Fellows.
“As artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies are further engrained in everything we do, SUNY is making sure every student has this essential core competency within our excellent academic curriculum,” said SUNY Chancellor John King in announcing the appointment of the class of 20 fellows.
Balyan was selected for the role given her research and scholarship activities related to natural language processing; data mining; machine learning; deep learning - including summarization, question-asking and question-answering; and the development of computational tools for health and educational applications.
“As an AI Fellow, I aim to build on my research in health and education to help faculty and staff integrate AI literacy into classrooms,” said Balyan. “My goal is to create learning experiences where students engage with AI critically and ethically. These fellowships are vital as AI becomes more pervasive, ensuring that students develop not only technical skills but also the awareness to use AI as a means of advancing equity and to serve the needs of their communities.”
The AI for the Public Good Fellows will be a resource to SUNY’s colleges and universities by providing targeted support for faculty and staff working to update courses and learning activities to incorporate AI literacy, including the effective and ethical use of AI and teaching students to critically evaluate AI-generated content.
“Dr. Balyan has researched the prospects for, impacts of, and issues related to machine learning across her career,” said Timothy E. Sams, president of SUNY Old Westbury. “Through this appointment, she can share that knowledge with peers across the state while championing the development and application of tools that support both the professional and ethical development of SUNY students.”
The launch of the SUNY AI for the Public Good Fellows follows SUNY’s updating of its general education requirements for undergraduates to incorporate the skills to ethically use artificial intelligence into the existing information literacy core competency. This update – along with a new general education core competency in civil discourse – will be implemented by Fall 2026.
Since arriving on campus as member of the faculty in 2020, Balyan has served as a collaborator or principal investigator on multiple grants awarded by the National Science Foundation involving topics including “Orchestration of Network Slicing for 5G-Enabled IoT Devices Using Reinforcement Learning,” “Privacy Preserving Tutoring System for Health Education of Low Literacy Hispanic Populations,” and “StEM: Stimulate, Engage and Motivate student research by enhancing the research capacity.”
She earned her Ph.D. in machine translation evaluation from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in New Delhi, India.