In a collaboration between Houston Christian University and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University, researchers aim to revolutionize the field of artificial intelligence.
The partnership, driven by the NCSA’s Center for AI Innovation, seeks to overcome the limitations of current AI models and pave the way for more robust and scalable solutions.
“To have someone in Houston that we can team up with to address some of the data-driven challenges and have a front-facing partner with some of the industry in that region is pretty powerful,” said Brendan McGinty, NCSA’s director of Industry. “I also see that we have a lot of alumni there … so from UIUC to Houston, it’s like a pipeline.”
McGinty also mentioned that although HCU is a smaller school, its focus on AI advancement makes it a powerful partner for collaborating with the NCSA. This partnership was, in part, inspired by the NCSA’s earlier collaborations.
“One of the early engagers of our center was IBM, and they were a powerful part of us coming together with HCU,” McGinty said.
Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!
The NCSA plays a large role on the national level as well as on campus.
“NCSA traditionally has been a high-performance computing center since its inception, but in recent years, a lot of compute cycles are used to support AI research,” said Volodymyr Kindratenko, assistant director at the NCSA.
The NCSA continues to be at the forefront of providing computational resources for “high-performance” computing and machine learning for AI. However, the NCSA hopes to address some limitations of current AI technology, such as privacy, data quality and understanding human creativity.
Recognizing these limitations, the partnership leverages the NCSA’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure to create specialized AI models.
One of the primary projects under this collaboration is the development of “UIUC.chat,” an AI-powered platform designed to enhance the student experience by providing AI-driven academic support and personalized learning resources.
By utilizing supercomputing capabilities, the platform promises a seamless and intuitive interface tailored to the University population.
“The instructor can upload course materials, and then the Chatbot can reply to student questions based on those materials,” Kindratenko said.
An instructor can also create a chat interface for the class and provide a key to allow students to unlock the AI resource. Any University student can access UIUC.chat for free thanks to the NCSA supplier model, which is currently in its pilot phase.
Kindratenko added that the AI model offers many more applications. The ability to extract, or scrape, up-to-date information from multiple websites is one of the ways the NCSA’s UIUC.chat aims to improve AI.
“Something as simple as scraping a single website or multiple websites and having chatbots that can respond allows us to explain concepts based on those assumptions and use them for scientific discovery,” Kindratenko said.
Kindratenko also mentioned the other abilities the NCSA’s AI model offers. The NCSA aims to provide a more secure AI platform than OpenAI, whose security and effectiveness are under scrutiny.
According to Kindratenko, the NCSA is a “completely self-contained system” that can disconnect from the internet without data leakage to external entities. Additionally, the NCSA’s AI can allow professors and students broader capabilities by ingesting several sources.
With HCU, the NCSA hopes to bring students from Houston to learn in the NCSA’s summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates program and gain hands-on experience with the supercomputing systems that transform AI.
“We’re so fortunate to have an institution as large as ours, where people come to us for expertise and thought leadership, and then we’re able to create this ecosystem that generates talented alumni for many years,” McGinty said.
