Houston university to launch artificial intelligence major, one of first in nation

BS in AI

Rice University's new Bachelor of Science in AI will be one of only a few in the country. Photo via Getty Images.

Rice University announced this month that it plans to introduce a Bachelor of Science in AI in the fall 2025 semester.

The new degree program will be part of the university's department of computer science in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing and is one of only a few like it in the country. It aims to focus on "responsible and interdisciplinary approaches to AI," according to a news release from the university.

“We are in a moment of rapid transformation driven by AI, and Rice is committed to preparing students not just to participate in that future but to shape it responsibly,” Amy Dittmar, the Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said in the release. “This new major builds on our strengths in computing and education and is a vital part of our broader vision to lead in ethical AI and deliver real-world solutions across health, sustainability and resilient communities.”

John Greiner, an assistant teaching professor of computer science in Rice's online Master of Computer Science program, will serve as the new program's director. Vicente Ordóñez-Román, an associate professor of computer science, was also instrumental in developing and approving the new major.

Until now, Rice students could study AI through elective courses and an advanced degree. The new bachelor's degree program opens up deeper learning opportunities to undergrads by blending traditional engineering and math requirements with other courses on ethics and philosophy as they relate to AI.

“With the major, we’re really setting out a curriculum that makes sense as a whole,” Greiner said in the release. “We are not simply taking a collection of courses that have been created already and putting a new wrapper around them. We’re actually creating a brand new curriculum. Most of the required courses are brand new courses designed for this major.”

Students in the program will also benefit from resources through Rice’s growing AI ecosystem, like the Ken Kennedy Institute, which focuses on AI solutions and ethical AI. The university also opened its new AI-focused "innovation factory," Rice Nexus, earlier this year.

“We have been building expertise in artificial intelligence,” Ordóñez-Román added in the release. “There are people working here on natural language processing, information retrieval systems for machine learning, more theoretical machine learning, quantum machine learning. We have a lot of expertise in these areas, and I think we’re trying to leverage that strength we’re building.”

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Mastering control room management for smoother critical infrastructure operations

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Control room management (CRM) systems play an integral role in ensuring the safe and efficient remote operations of automated processes for the world's most critical infrastructures (CI). If anything goes wrong with these CIs, the risks are major: loss of life or catastrophic environmental disasters. For this reason, rigorous regulatory requirements are crucial.

CRM systems give operators the ability to automate and take control of CI processes, giving operators situational awareness and real-time visibility of remote assets. This minimizes the need for manual work and inspection, and scales a company's ability to safely manage many assets over a large geographical area from one control room.

Most CI have to handle hazardous material in some, if not all, of their operational areas. Though different by industry, regulations and oversight are extremely necessary.

ICS (Industrial Control Systems) and CRM tools are key components of real-time monitoring for advanced warning and emergency alarming. The combination of a “green, amber, red” alert on the screen of an operator's control console will prompt them to respond, and potentially lead to following emergency shut-down response procedures. Training and testing of the control systems and their related standards, procedures, and activities are all recorded in a system of record in compliance with regulatory requirements.

Current challenges
One of the biggest challenges is the ability to easily aggregate the data from the many different systems and integrate them with the operator's daily activity and responses to the many notifications they receive. This makes it difficult for handover, when a new control room operator comes in fresh to take over from the operator coming off duty. Ensuring a clean and clear handover that encompasses all the pertinent information, so that the new operator can take over the console with ease and clarity, is much more difficult than some would imagine.

Another issue is the sheer volume of data. When you have thousands of sensors streaming data, it is not unrealistic for a console to receive a few thousand data points per second. Performance and continuity are priorities on a CI control room console(s). So there is no room for error — meaning there is no room for big (quite literally) data.

All of this means that real-time data must be pushed off the operational and process control network and moved into an area where there are no controls, but big data can be stored to produce big-data analytic capabilities, enabling AI, machine learning, and other data science.

Controller/operator fatigue is also an issue. Manual tracking, documenting, and record-keeping increases fatigue, leading to more mistakes and omissions.

Opportunities for improvement
The Houston-based Tory Technologies, Inc. is a corporation specializing in advanced software applications, creating and integrating various innovative technologies, and providing solutions for control room management and electronic flow measurement data management.

Tory Technologies, Inc. can help with the auto population of forms, inclusion of historical alarms and responses, and easy handover of control with active/open issues highlighted, making for an easier transition from one operator to the next.

"CRM is essential for keeping operations safe and efficient in industries where mistakes can lead to serious problems," says Juan Torres, director of operations - MaCRoM at Tory Technologies, Inc. "While many control rooms have worked hard to meet compliance standards, challenges remain that can affect performance and safety. It's not enough to just meet the basic rules; we need to go further by using smarter tools and strategies that make CRM more than just compliant, but truly effective."

Shaun Six, president of UTSI International, notes that, "CRM solutions are scalable. A smart integration with relevant systems and related data will reduce 'white noise' and increase relevance of data being displayed at the right time, or recalled when most helpful."

The future state
Offering CRM as a service for non-regulated control rooms will give economies of scale to critical infrastructure operators, which will allow dispatching, troubleshooting, and network monitoring so operators can focus on more value-add activities.

It can also virtualize network monitoring, ensuring that field machines and edge computers are compliant with industry and company standards and are not exposed to external threats.

Even better: Much of this can be automated. Smart tools can look through each device and test that passwords are changed, configurations are secure, and firmware/software has been properly patched or safeguarded against known exploits.

The sheer volume of data from these exercises can be overwhelming to operators. But a trained professional can easily filter and curate this data, cutting through the noise and helping asset owners address high-risk/high-probability exploits and plan/manage them.

Ultimately, the goal is to make control rooms efficient, getting the right information to the right people at the right time, while also retaining and maintaining required documents and data, ensuring an operators “license to operator” is uninterrupted and easily accessible to external parties when requested or needed.

Integrating smart CRM systems, network monitoring tools, and testing/validating processes and procedures are all easily accessible with current technological capabilities and availability, letting operators focus on the task at hand with ease and peace of mind.

BrainLM is now well-trained enough to use to fine-tune a specific task and to ask questions in other studies. Photo via Getty Images

Houston researchers create AI model to tap into how brain activity relates to illness

brainiac

Houston researchers are part of a team that has created an AI model intended to understand how brain activity relates to behavior and illness.

Scientists from Baylor College of Medicine worked with peers from Yale University, University of Southern California and Idaho State University to make Brain Language Model, or BrainLM. Their research was published as a conference paper at ICLR 2024, a meeting of some of deep learning’s greatest minds.

“For a long time we’ve known that brain activity is related to a person’s behavior and to a lot of illnesses like seizures or Parkinson’s,” Dr. Chadi Abdallah, associate professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor and co-corresponding author of the paper, says in a press release. “Functional brain imaging or functional MRIs allow us to look at brain activity throughout the brain, but we previously couldn’t fully capture the dynamic of these activities in time and space using traditional data analytical tools.

"More recently, people started using machine learning to capture the brain complexity and how it relates it to specific illnesses, but that turned out to require enrolling and fully examining thousands of patients with a particular behavior or illness, a very expensive process,” Abdallah continues.

Using 80,000 brain scans, the team was able to train their model to figure out how brain activities related to one another. Over time, this created the BrainLM brain activity foundational model. BrainLM is now well-trained enough to use to fine-tune a specific task and to ask questions in other studies.

Abdallah said that using BrainLM will cut costs significantly for scientists developing treatments for brain disorders. In clinical trials, it can cost “hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said, to enroll numerous patients and treat them over a significant time period. By using BrainLM, researchers can enroll half the subjects because the AI can select the individuals most likely to benefit.

The team found that BrainLM performed successfully in many different samples. That included predicting depression, anxiety and PTSD severity better than other machine learning tools that do not use generative AI.

“We found that BrainLM is performing very well. It is predicting brain activity in a new sample that was hidden from it during the training as well as doing well with data from new scanners and new population,” Abdallah says. “These impressive results were achieved with scans from 40,000 subjects. We are now working on considerably increasing the training dataset. The stronger the model we can build, the more we can do to assist with patient care, such as developing new treatment for mental illnesses or guiding neurosurgery for seizures or DBS.”

For those suffering from neurological and mental health disorders, BrainLM could be a key to unlocking treatments that will make a life-changing difference.

The UH team is developing ways to use machine learning to ensure that power systems can continue to run efficiently when pulling their energy from wind and solar sources. Photo via Getty Images

Houston researcher scores prestigious NSF award for machine learning, power grid tech

grant funding

An associate professor at the University of Houston received the highly competitive National Science Foundation CAREER Award earlier this month for a proposal focused on integrating renewable resources to improve power grids.

The award grants more than $500,000 to Xingpeng Li, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and leader of the Renewable Power Grid Lab at UH, to continue his work on developing ways to use machine learning to ensure that power systems can continue to run efficiently when pulling their energy from wind and solar sources, according to a statement from UH. This work has applications in the events of large disturbances to the grid.

Li explains that currently, power grids run off of converted, stored kinetic energy during grid disturbances.

"For example, when the grid experiences sudden large generation losses or increased electrical loads, the stored kinetic energy immediately converted to electrical energy and addressed the temporary shortfall in generation,” Li said in a statement. “However, as the proportion of wind and solar power increases in the grid, we want to maximize their use since their marginal costs are zero and they provide clean energy. Since we reduce the use of those traditional generators, we also reduce the power system inertia (or stored kinetic energy) substantially.”

Li plans to use machine learning to create more streamlined models that can be implemented into day-ahead scheduling applications that grid operators currently use.

“With the proposed new modeling and computational approaches, we can better manage grids and ensure it can supply continuous quality power to all the consumers," he said.

In addition to supporting Li's research and model creations, the funds will also go toward Li and his team's creation of a free, open-source tool for students from kindergarten up through their graduate studies. They are also developing an “Applied Machine Learning in Power Systems” course. Li says the course will help meet workforce needs.

The CAREER Award recognizes early-career faculty members who “have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to the NSF. It's given to about 500 researchers each year.

Earlier this year, Rice assistant professor Amanda Marciel was also granted an NSF CAREER Award to continue her research in designing branch elastomers that return to their original shape after being stretched. The research has applications in stretchable electronics and biomimetic tissues.

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This article originally ran on EnergyCapital.

The NIH grant goes toward TransplantAI's work developing more precise models for heart and lung transplantation. Photo via Getty Images

Houston health tech company scores $2.2M grant to use AI to make organ transplants smarter, more successful

future of medicine

The National Institute of Health has bestowed a Houston medtech company with a $2.2 million Fast-Track to Phase 2 award. InformAI will use the money for the product development and commercialization of its AI-enabled organ transplant informatics platform.

Last year, InformAI CEO Jim Havelka told InnovationMap, “A lot of organs are harvested and discarded.”

TransplantAI solves that problem, as well as organ scarcity and inefficiency in allocation of the precious resource.

How does it work? Machine learning and deep learning from a million donor transplants informs the AI, which determines who is the best recipient for each available organ using more than 500 clinical parameters. Organ transplant centers and organ procurement organizations (OPOs) will be able to use the product to make a decision on how to allocate each organ in real time. Ultimately, the tool will service 250 transplant centers and 56 OPOs around the United States.

The NIH grant goes toward developing more precise models for heart and lung transplantation (kidney and liver algorithms are further along in development thanks to a previous award from the National Science Foundation), as well as Phase 2 efforts to fully commercialize TransplantAI.

"There is an urgent need for improved and integrated predictive clinical insights in solid organ transplantation, such as for real-time assessment of waitlist mortality and the likelihood of successful post-transplantation outcomes," according to the grant’s lead clinical investigator, Abbas Rana, associate professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine.

“This information is essential for healthcare teams and patients to make informed decisions, particularly in complex cases where expanded criteria allocation decisions are being considered," Rana continues. "Currently, the separation of donor and recipient data into different systems requires clinical teams to conduct manual, parallel reviews for pairing assessments. Our team, along with those at other leading transplant centers nationwide, receives hundreds of organ-recipient match offers weekly.”

Organ transplantation is moving into the future, and Transplant AI is at the forefront.

Houston can learn a lot from the decades of success from Silicon Valley, according to this Houston founder, who outlines just what all the city needs to do to become the startup city it has the potential to be. Photo via Getty Images

Houston expert: Can Houston replicate and surpass the success of Silicon Valley?

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Anyone who knows me knows, as a Houston Startup Founder, I often muse about the still developing potential for startups in Houston, especially considering the amount of industry here, subject matter expertise, capital, and size.

For example, Houston is No. 2 in the country for Fortune 500 Companies — with 26 Bayou City companies on the list — behind only NYC, which has 47 ranked corporations, according to Fortune.

Considering layoffs, fund closings, and down rounds, things aren’t all that peachy in San Francisco for the first time in a long time, and despite being a Berkeley native, I’m rooting for Houston now that I’m a transplant.

Let’s start by looking at some stats.

While we’re not No. 1 in all areas, I believe we have the building blocks to be a major player in startups, and in tech (and not just energy and space tech). How? If the best predictor of future success is history, why not use the template of the GOAT of all startup cities: San Francisco and YCombinator. Sorry fellow founders – you’ve heard me talk about this repeatedly.

YCombinator is considered the GOAT of Startup Accelerators/Incubators based on:

The Startup success rate: I’ve heard it’s as high as 75 percent (vs. the national average of 5 to 10 percent) Arc Search says 50 percent of YC Co’s fail within 12 years – not shabby.
Their startup-to-unicorn ratio: 5 to 7 percent of YC startups become unicorns depending on the source — according to an Arc Search search (if you haven’t tried Arc Search do – super cool).
Their network.

YC also parlayed that success into a "YC Startup School" offering:

Free weekly lessons by YC partners — sometimes featuring unicorn alumni
A document and video Library (YC SAFE, etc)
Startup perks for students (AWS cloud credits, etc.)
YC co-founder matching to help founders meet co-founders

Finally, there’s the over $80 billion in returns, according to Arc search, they’ve generated since their 2005 inception with a total of 4,000 companies in their portfolio at over $600 billion in value. So GOAT? Well just for perspective there were a jaw-dropping 18,000 startups in startup school the year I participated – so GOAT indeed.

So how do they do it? Based on anecdotal evidence, their winning formula is said to be the following well-oiled process:

Bring over 282 startups (the number in last cohort) to San Francisco for 90 days to prototype, refine the product, and land on the go-to-market strategy. This includes a pre-seed YC SAFE investment of a phased $500,000 commitment for a fixed min 7 percent of equity, plus more equity at the next round’s valuation, according to YC.
Over 50 percent of the latest cohort were idea stage and heavily AI focused.
Traction day: inter-portfolio traction the company. YC has over 4,000 portfolio companies who can and do sign up for each other’s companies products because “they’re told to."
Get beta testers and test from YC portfolio companies and YC network.
If they see the traction scales to a massively scalable business, they lead the seed round and get this: schedule and attend the VC meetings with the founders.
They create a "fear of missing out" mentality on Sand Hill Road as they casually mention who they’re meeting with next.
They block competitors in the sector by getting the top VC’s to co-invest with then in the seed so competitors are locked out of the A list VC funding market, who then are up against the most well-funded and buzzed about players in the space.

If what I've seen is true, within a six-month period a startup idea is prototyped, tested, pivoted, launched, tractioned, seeded, and juiced for scale with people who can ‘make’ the company all in their corner, if not already on their board.

So how on earth can Houston best this?

We have a massive amount of businesses — around 200,000 — and people — an estimated 7.3 million and growing.
We have capital in search of an identity beyond oil.
Our Fortune 500 companies that are hiring consultants for things that startups here that can do for free, quicker, and for a fraction of the extended cost.
We have a growing base of tech talent for potential machine learning and artificial intelligence talent
A sudden shot at the increasingly laid off big tech engineers.
We have more accelerators and incubators.

What do we need to pull it off?

An organized well-oiled YC-like process
An inter-Houston traction process
An "Adopt a Startup" program where local companies are willing to beta test and iterate with emerging startup products
We have more accelerators but the cohorts are small — average five to 10 per cohort.
Strategic pre-seed funding, possibly with corporate partners (who can make the company by being a client) and who de-risk the investment.
Companies here to use Houston startup’s products first when they’re launched.
A forum to match companies’ projects or labs groups etc., to startups who can solve them.
A process in place to pull all these pieces together in an organized, structured sequence.

There is one thing missing in the list: there has to be an entity or a person who wants to make this happen. Someone who sees all the pieces, and has the desire, energy and clout to make it happen; and we all know this is the hardest part. And so for now, our hopes of besting YC may be up in the air as well.

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Jo Clark is the founder of Circle.ooo, a Houston-based tech startup that's streamlining events management.

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Rice University launches AI initiative, plans to hire 75 faculty

ai expansion

Houston’s Rice University announced a university-wide artificial intelligence initiative this week that includes hiring 75 new AI-focused faculty. It also shared new details about its planned state-of-the-art facility, The Arc.

Fresh off the announcement of Rice’s new Master of Artificial Intelligence (MAI) coming next fall, the university shared that it plans to expand its AI-related courses and be a “global leader in advanced computing and responsible AI.”

Rice reports that it has already hired 35 faculty members to deepen expertise across schools and departments regarding AI, and plans to recruit 40 more across disciplines including engineering, computing, health, energy, environmental resilience, business, humanities and the arts.

Rice's schools and departments have identified the four cluster areas to guide its hiring:

Foundational AI
AI for Health
AI for Energy, the Environment and Resiliency
Responsible AI: Society and Ethics

“Hiring exceptional faculty is essential, but it is only one part of the equation,” Amy Dittmar, Rice’s Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said in a news release. “We are building the people, places and partnerships needed to advance AI from foundational discovery to societal impact.”

Another major component of the effort is the planned 200,000-square-foot facility, The Arc, which Rice announced will break ground this fall. Rice will occupy nearly 80,000 square feet of office and laboratory space dedicated to topics including AI, data science, robotics, computational engineering and energy. The university previously announced that The Arc would be completed in Q1 2028.

The Arc will also house the AI Foundry, which is being developed as a collaborative space for industry partners, scientists and students.

“As Rice grows, we are being intentional about where we invest and how we build,” Rice President Reginald DesRoches added in the release. “By bringing together exceptional faculty, a strong interdisciplinary research community, world-class facilities and Houston’s extraordinary innovation ecosystem, Rice has an opportunity not simply to participate in the AI revolution but to help define its future.”

5 minority-founded startups shaping the future of Houston innovation

meet the finalists

Houston’s startup ecosystem reflects the diversity of the city itself.

As part of the 2026 Houston Innovation Awards, our Minority-founded Businesses category will honor an innovative Houston startup founded or co-founded by BIPOC or LGBTQ+ representation.

Five minority-founded businesses have been named finalists for the 2026 award. The finalists, selected by our esteemed panel of judges, range from an AI edtech startup to a company operating in the floating offshore energy infrastructure sector.

Read more about these innovative businesses, their initiatives, and their inspirational founders below. The 2026 winners will be announced on InnovationMap.com in mid-November.

AI Made Fun

Edtech startup AI Made Fun is working to close the gap in AI education by teaching K-12 students how to understand and responsibly use artificial intelligence. The company has developed a comprehensive AI literacy curriculum with 60 modules, animated videos, interactive activities, teacher guides and family resources. Its curriculum covers how AI works, misinformation, algorithmic bias, data privacy, online safety and academic integrity.

AI Made Fun was founded in 2025 by Devshree Golecha. It launched in classrooms this school year with five licensed schools serving more than 800 students. The company is pursuing partnerships with Houston-area school districts, including Houston ISD and Alief ISD, and has pledged free and subsidized access for underserved communities.

Deep Anchor Solutions

Offshore energy consulting and design company Deep Anchor Solutions wants to help scale floating offshore energy infrastructure by removing anchoring as a barrier. Its deeply embedded ring anchor (DERA) technology can be installed quietly without heavy-lift vessels, reducing anchor-related costs by up to 75 percent and lifecycle CO2 emissions by up to 80 percent.

The company was founded in 2023 by CEO Junho Lee and technical advisor Charles Aubeny. Lee earned his Ph.D. in geotechnical engineering from Texas A&M University, where Aubeny is a professor of civil and environmental engineering. The company has participated in numerous accelerators and incubators, including Greentown Labs, MassChallenge, EnergyTechNexus LiftOff and others. Lee was an Activate 2025 fellow.

HEXAspec

Rice University spinout HEXASpec is working to improve the sustainability and thermal conductivity of semiconductor chips. The company has developed breakthrough inorganic fillers that allow graphic processing units (GPUs) to use less water and electricity and generate less heat.

HEXASpec was founded in 2025 by CEO Tianshu Zhai, CTO Jing Zhang and chief product officer Chen-Yang Lin. It has raised $800,000 in pre-seed funding and another $1.5 million in non-dilutive grants, according to the company's application. The startup won the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge in 2024 and the 2025 Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition during CERAWeek in the TEX-E student track in 2025. It was awarded a $500,000 National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant last summer.

Prana Surgical

Health tech company Prana Surgical is developing a minimally invasive surgical platform for small, hard-to-reach lung nodules that may be cancerous. The company's Prana System cleared U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval earlier this year.

Prana Surgical was originally founded as Prana Thoracic in 2022. It has participated in numerous accelerators, including the Texas Medical Center Innovation Accelerator in 2023 and the IGNITE Health accelerator in 2022. It raised $6 million in Series A funding rounds in 2023 and 2024 , with a Series B currently ongoing. The company said in its application that it is currently moving into the next stage of clinical validation and revenue generation in the U.S., in addition to preparing its manufacturing and commercial infrastructure for broader use.

Torres Orbital Mining Inc.

Space tech company Torres Orbital Mining is developing autonomous excavation and material preprocessing systems to move and process granular materials while reducing workers’ exposure to hazardous dust. The company is initially commercializing its technology for Earth-bound applications—including silica sand, recycled glass and mine tailings—though the technology is also designed to support future lunar mining operations. The company aims to accelerate a permanent and ethical human presence on the Moon.

CEO Luis Torres founded Torres Orbital Mining in 2025. The company is a member of Greentown Labs and has participated in accelerators like the ESRIC Space Resources Startup Program and Capital Factory All Access Fund. The company received a six-month, $225,000 SBIR Phase I contract from NASA in August.

Italian aerospace company sets up first U.S. office at Houston Spaceport

welcome to houston

Como, Italy-based aerospace company Involve Space recently made the Houston Spaceport the site of its first U.S. office.

Involve Space develops high-altitude balloon platforms for Earth observation, scientific research and hardware testing. The balloons carry instruments into the stratosphere (a layer of the upper atmosphere) to collect images and data, conduct experiments and test technology.

The company plans to launch its first commercial missions from Houston by the end of this year, according to a news release.

“Houston is the global center of aerospace, and our presence at Houston Spaceport strengthens our international growth trajectory,” Jonathan Polotto, founder and CEO of Involve Space, said in the release.

Founded in 2021, Involve Space incorporates aerospace hardware, AI and geospatial tools into its offerings. Its proprietary CLEAR platform uses conversational AI to help customers interpret data and support decision-making.

Located at Ellington Airport, the Houston Spaceport provides a base for Involve Space’s North American operations, including business development and partnerships with aerospace companies and researchers.

Other tenants at the Houston Spaceport include NASA, Axiom Space, Venus Aerospace and Intuitive Machines.

Involve Space’s relationship with the Houston Spaceport began in January 2025, when it conducted its first U.S. pilot launch. During the five-hour mission, the balloon reached an altitude of about 85,000 feet and traveled about 250 miles across Texas.

One of Involve Space’s first U.S. customers is Houston-based Rhodium Scientific, a space biotech company. Polotto and Rhodium Scientific founder and CEO Olivia Gamez Holzhaus signed a deal to conduct biotech experiments aboard Involve Space’s stratospheric balloon platforms before planned missions to orbit.

“The presence of innovative platforms like those developed by Involve strengthens the Spaceport’s role as a site for testing, validating, and deploying advanced technologies between aeronautics and space,” Jim Szczesniak, director of aviation for Houston Airports, added in the release.

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