The University of Maryland has appointed five scholars to its inaugural faculty cohort at the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM), the university’s hub for AI collaboration across campus.
“This inaugural cohort of core faculty marks a major milestone for AIM,” said Hal Daumé, AIM director and Volpi-Cupal Endowed Professor of Computer Science. “Individually, each conducts research that deeply impacts the practice of AI, through an interdisciplinary lens. And collectively, their expertise expands our capacity to pursue ambitious, interdisciplinary AI research, together with the AI expertise already on campus.”
Three members of the inaugural faculty cohort are women.
Ilaria Canavotto joined the department of philosophy in fall 2025 as an assistant professor, following several years as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Maryland and the University of Amsterdam. Her research lies at the intersection of logic, artificial intelligence, and law, with additional interests in social choice theory, game and decision theory, and metaphysics. Dr. Canavotto holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in philosophy from the Catholic University of Milan in Italy, a master’s degree in logic and philosophy of science from Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich in Germany, and a Ph.D. from the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam.
Yulin Hswen is a new associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics. Before joining the Maryland faculty in January, Dr. Hswen was an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and a core faculty member of the Computational Precision Health Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research integrates large-scale internet-based data, including social media, search data, images and other unstructured sources, to understand how digital narratives, human behavior, and lived environments shape population health. Dr. Hswen received her doctorate in social and computational epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School.
Swati Srivastava is slated to join the University of Maryland faculty this summer as an associate professor of government and politics. She currently serves as an associate professor of political science and a university faculty scholar at Purdue University in Indiana. Dr. Srivastava also holds appointments as a faculty associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and as a non-resident scholar in digital futures at New America. Her research focuses on private power in global governance and the emerging politics of Big Tech and AI. Dr. Srivastava earned her bachelor’s degree in political science and global studies from the University of California, Los Angles, her master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University in Illinois.