UC Riverside has received $8 million in federal grants to help the Inland Empire become more proficient in artificial intelligence and better align engineering education with the needs of regional industries. The two grants, awarded by the U.S. Department of Education through its Strengthening Institutions Program, will support separate projects at UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering aimed at preparing students for a workforce increasingly shaped by AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies.

The promise and perils of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence — a technology reshaping how we think, learn, work, and live — took center stage at UC Riverside's first AI Summit on October 15. The daylong event brought together UCR administrators, faculty, students, and industry leaders to explore AI's extraordinary potential to accelerate scientific discoveries, tackle complex problems and perhaps even help find a cure for cancer.

UC Riverside computer scientists ​found that AI model confidence and correctness can arise from different internal features, a discovery that could help build more reliable AI models. ​

Three pioneering studies by UC Riverside researchers will be presented orally in September at the 19th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026) in Malmö, Sweden, one of the world's premier conferences on computer vision and artificial intelligence. Together, the studies advance machine perception—the science of helping computers interpret visual information—by enabling them to see more clearly, understand more of their surroundings, and make better decisions. Led by faculty members and students in UCR's Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, the work highlights the

As AI-generated fake videos become more problematic, UC Riverside computer scientists developed a tool that moves beyond simply identifying whether a video is fake. It also determines which AI system created it.

UC Riverside graduate student Erfan Shayegani has been named a 2026 MLCommons Rising Star, an honor recognizing emerging researchers whose work is helping shape the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and computing systems.

Is the internet losing its soul? A collaborative study by UC Riverside computer and social scientists suggests so. As artificial intelligence increasingly answers our online questions with quick summaries and polished explanations, we may be gaining efficiency while losing something distinctly human in the process.

Computer scientists at UC Riverside have identified troubling flaws in a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents designed to take over routine computer chores while users are away — sorting emails, organizing files, analyzing data, and handling other everyday digital tasks that might otherwise consume hours. The researchers found that the automated agents can become dangerously fixated on completing assignments without recognizing when their actions are harmful, contradictory, or simply irrational.