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Dec 04, 2025
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2025-2026 Undergraduate Catalog
AI and Language and Intercultural Competence BS
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 Return to: Majors and Combined Degrees
The AI for Language and Intercultural Competence program is a four-year interdisciplinary degree that integrates the study of the societal impacts of Artificial Intelligence technologies with focused study of a specific language and the cultures of the communities who use that language. This program is designed to provide the breadth and depth competencies needed for UB graduates to integrate rapidly evolving AI technologies into the development of computational systems that support the use of languages other than English, meeting the needs of future employers and society at large to develop and refine AI systems and applications that improve the social good. Developed collaboratively with existing academic units and departments, this new degree program leverages the expertise of faculty across different language programs and in linguistics, along with those in the AI & Society department. Students enrolled in the degree will choose to specialize in one of the following languages: American Sign Language, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, or Spanish.
Visit the AI and Language and Intercultural Competence academic program page for more information about the academic experience, who you will learn from, opportunities outside of class and what you can do with this degree.
Visit the Linguistics department page for contact information, a brief overview of the department and the curricular options.
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Math Requirement (4 credits)
AI & Society Core (15 credits)
AI & Technology Core (16 credits)
AI for Language and Intercultural Competence Core (15 credits)
AI & Society Capstone (3 credits)
Language Sequence (27-36 credits)
Choose one language sequence to complete. Japanese Sequence (32 credits)
German Sequence (30 credits)
Korean Sequence (32 credits)
Chinese Sequence (32 credits)
American Sign Language Sequence (27 credits)
Spanish Sequence (36 credits)
Italian Sequence (36 credits)
French Sequence (36 credits)
Total Credits Required for Major: 80-89
Additional Degree Requirements Include:
- Additional coursework to fulfill UB Curriculum requirements
- Elective courses as needed to complete the 120-125 credit hour total
Total Credits Required for Graduation: 120-125
Academic Requirements
Minimum GPA of 2.000 overall. Curricular Plan
Please click here to see the suggested curricular plan for each language sequence. Learning Outcomes
Society learning outcomes - Classifying and differentiating between major kinds of AI technologies and how they can be used to advance the social good in education, government, business, and other areas of society, while keeping in mind potential societal harms
- Acquiring knowledge of ethical issues surrounding the use and development of AI and applying that knowledge to determine how to use AI technologies ethically in a given context
- Situating new AI technologies with respect to earlier disruptive technologies in order to be able to compare and contrast AI with other major technological advances both in terms of societal good and harm.
- Assessing the impact of AI technologies on the development of policy proposals in both technological and nontechnological domains
- Determining how AI technologies interact with social structures and the ways that they can reinforce existing biases and structural inequities and developing ideas for how their use can mitigate such biases
- Identifying the impact of AI technologies on how people communicate with each other and assessing when these impacts are either harmful or beneficial to the social good
Technology learning outcomes - Mastering basic linear algebra skills such as defining vectors and matrices, computing their properties, and understating how they are used in AI computations
- Gaining an understanding of probability distributions, statistical properties of data, and their applications in AI
- Designing and implementing computational artifacts
- Applying foundational computational thinking skills and artifacts to analyze and interpret real-world data
- Understanding the social and ethical implications of AI computation
Experiential learning outcomes - Function effectively as a member or leader of a team engaged in activities appropriate to the program’s area of focus
- Apply concepts from linguistics and computer science to the application of human language technologies to real-world problems.
Integrative learning outcomes - Apply AI theory and methods to produce computationally-based solutions to problems related to geospatial analytics
Language and Intercultural Competence learning outcomes - Demonstrate communicative proficiency in the target language for some complex topics and concepts,
encompassing listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills, or signing and comprehending, as applicable - Develop a deeper understanding and respect of the cultures associated with the communities who use the target
language and sensitivity to cultural differences to communicate effectively across cultures - Identify and explain the major structural characteristics of the target language and its key functional characteristics
concerning how the language is used in various contexts and by different speakers - Comprehend the core concepts of linguistics, as well as the basic literature that assumes such concepts.
- Understand the place of language in its broader cognitive and social context
- Analyze linguistic data from English or other languages and construct descriptions of particular linguistic
phenomena in particular languages - Understand the way that different language technologies can be used to analyze and generate linguistic data
(HEGIS: 49.03 HUMANITIES and SOCIAL SCIENCE, CIP: Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies, Other) |
Return to: Majors and Combined Degrees
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