Boston University

Boston University is a private research university founded in 1839 by Boston Methodists, originally as the Newbury Biblical Institute in Vermont. It was chartered as Boston University by the Massachusetts legislature in 1869 and has grown into one of the largest private universities in the United States. The university spans three campuses in Boston covering approximately 140 acres, with 17 schools and colleges, more than 300 fields of study, and around 37,500 students. BU employs over 10,600 staff and faculty and generates more than $554 million in annual research expenditures, with sponsored research awards exceeding $645 million. It is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an invitation-only consortium of North America's leading research universities. In the AI safety and governance space, BU hosts several relevant programs. The Boston University AI Safety & Alignment (AISA) community runs introductory technical and policy fellowships covering topics like reward misspecification, mechanistic interpretability, compute governance, and AI regulation. Its Verras Program supports independent research tracks for advanced students. The AI Safety & Policy Lab (AISAP) is a semester-long initiative in which interdisciplinary student teams collaborate with state legislators to translate AI safety research into actionable policy recommendations. These programs are student-led but affiliated with the university. At the institutional level, BU launched the Artificial Intelligence Development Accelerator (AIDA) under President Melissa Gilliam to coordinate AI strategy across academic and administrative functions. The Rafik Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering houses the AI Research (AIR) Initiative, which focuses on intelligent systems, natural language processing, computer vision, and AI applications in public health and education. BU received an Open Philanthropy grant of $756,396 over two years to support the LLM Research Benchmark project, led by professors Najoung Kim and Sebastian Schuster, evaluating the abilities of large language models at performing academic machine learning research. This grant falls within Open Philanthropy's focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.