AI Initiatives

UMBC Shield and the black text UMBC Artificial Intelligence

The Division of Information Technology’s AI site will help the UMBC community with information on using artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI (GenAI), to support UMBC’s Administrative, Instructional, and Research efforts. This site has been created to help employees advance their use of GenAI.

We recommend that our UMBC community begin by visiting GenAI Tools, a page that highlights free resources and provides guidance on using GenAI while safeguarding UMBC institutional data safely.

For staff seeking support, we encourage people to look at Administrative AI, as a starting point. Our goal is to save folks time, improve the quality of their work, and increase productivity. We showcase tools that DoIT provides to support these objectives.

We have launched myUMBC Answers, an AI-supported search bar. We are seeking partners to expand this tool. The key to leveraging myUMBC Answers is providing validated and accurate content, such as annual FAQs or handbooks.

Faculty, are encouraged to explore Instructional AI and Research AI. The UMBC Center for AI in the College of Engineering is an excellent resource for AI-related research and innovation.  Stay informed by following the center’s social media channels on LinkedIn, Bluesky, X, and Facebook.

Members of the UMBC community can subscribe to the UMBC AI Group to receive email about AI-related news and events. If you have news to share with the UMBC AI community or suggestions or comments on the site, please send them to umbc-ai@cs.umbc.edu.

AI News

 

Showing items tagged digital-accessibility. Show All

6 Ways to Make Humanities Content More Accessible

The text matters. So does whether students can reach it.

A student pulls up the assigned primary source the night before class: a scanned nineteenth-century pamphlet, photographed at an angle, half the page lost in shadow. She can make out maybe...

Posted: October 27, 2026, 12:00 PM

Course Roadmap to Equity Learning Design logo

Fix Your Content Day: A campus-wide day of course accessibility fixes

November 10th: 1,600 fixes. 160 courses. One day.

Fix Your Content Day is a campus-wide accessibility sprint happening on November 10, 2026. For one day, faculty and staff across UMBC will come together, virtually and in person, to tackle...

Posted: October 22, 2026, 10:00 AM

A human figure with outstretched arms inside a circle of two curved arrows, suggesting movement. Below the figure are two words: digital accessibility.

6 Ways to Make Visual and Creative Media More Accessible

Art can challenge students without creating barriers.

A student opens the image for tomorrow's critique. The assignment asks her to analyze composition, contrast, and scale, but the image description says only, "abstract painting." She knows what...

Posted: October 20, 2026, 4:59 PM

Course Roadmap to Equity Learning Design logo

Add Alt Text to Images Inside Your PDFs Using Ally’s Latest Update

Describe PDF images without leaving Blackboard

A student using a screen reader opens your lecture notes and reaches the diagram that ties the week together. The screen reader says one word: “diagram.jpg.” Until now, fixing that meant finding...

Posted: October 15, 2026, 10:00 AM

A human figure with outstretched arms inside a circle of two curved arrows, suggesting movement. Below the figure are two words: digital accessibility.

6 Ways to Make Social Science Content More Accessible

Where evidence lives shouldn't decide who can reach it.

A student opens the assigned dataset the night before discussion, ready to test a hypothesis about voting patterns in urban counties. But the chart won't resize, the color-coded legend is...

Posted: October 13, 2026, 10:00 AM

Course Roadmap to Equity Learning Design logo