AI Virtual Explorer for Research, Discovery, and Education (AI Verde)
An open-source, in-house AI pipeline created by the Data Science Institute at the University of Arizona, AI Verde is designed to act as a one-stop shop for all research and teaching needs of a university campus, with a focus on accuracy, privacy preservation, and intellectual property protection. AI Verde meets the users where they are by providing training workshops starting from programming workshops through advanced AI.
Unique solution
Large Language Models (LLM) and chatbots offer rapid answers on virtually any topic. However, their use at universities presents challenges that can lead to privacy and copyright concerns. Additionally, commercial LLMs often lack content-specific training, such as course materials or specialized research domains, and may operate without adequate safeguards.
AI Verde addresses these challenges by providing a secure, in-house AI tool tailored for academic environments.
- Privacy-Preserving AI – AI Verde ensures user data remains protected within university boundaries.
- Customizable AI Models – Universities can deploy AI models of their choice, trained on relevant course materials and research data.
- User-Friendly Interface – Access AI Verde through an intuitive conversational interface or a programmatic API for advanced research applications.
- Enhanced Academic Collaboration – Faculty, researchers, and students can easily leverage AI for learning, teaching, and data synthesis.
- Access to dedicated hardware – AI Verde provides you access to state-of-the-art hardware including the latest GPUs, VRAM, NVMEe SSDs, etc. from Jetstream2, a National Science Foundation's national infrastructure.
- On-boarding and enrolling – Automatic enrolling/de-enrolling and budgeting and distributing access tokens to AI models
FAQs - AI VERDE
AI Virtual Explorer for Research, Discovery, and Education (AI Verde) is an open-source, in-house AI pipeline created by the Data Science Institute at the University of Arizona. It is designed to act as a one-stop shop for all research and teaching needs of a university campus, with a focus on accuracy, privacy preservation, and intellectual property protection. AI Verde meets the users where they are by providing training workshops starting from programming workshops through advanced AI.
Currently, AI Verde is available only to the University of Arizona community and a U of A NetID is required. If you are U of A faculty, staff, or researcher and want to use AI Verde for a course or research, email verde-support@cyverse.org. We will respond and set up an initial consultation to identify your specific needs and discuss how the AI Verde team can help.
Students who want access to AI-Verde, email RII-DataScienceInstitute@arizona.edu.
AI Verde helps:
- Reduce the burden of answering questions
- Understand the temperature/pulse of the class
- Provide a single control plane to work with LLMs and AI
- Create tokens and budgets for the entire class
- Index, read, and present research papers in a cogent manner
- Understand the latest state of the art research papers, and support cross-university collaboration
- In writing and verifying grant proposals
To load a publicly available LLM programmatically, there is a huge hardware requirement for users, even just for asking simple questions. If one wants to do more complicated tasks like retrieval augmented generation (RAG) or fine-tuning for a specialized dataset, the hardware requirement increases exponentially. AI Verde negates that by providing access to state-of-the-art hardware hosted and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Also, AI Verde addresses most of the concerns raised by faculty and students regarding commercially available chatbots including privacy preservation, intellectual property preservation, guardrails, fewer hallucinations, elastic hardware allocation, and seamless integration into existing learning pipelines.
Yes! We offer training and consultations to help with your unique circumstance. Our team of AI experts are here to help.
- Students, faculty, and researchers who want to use AI Verde as a chatbot to ask questions to the latest LLM, sign up for training to get started. [What is the latest LLM? Where is the link to sign up?]
- For those who want to learn what AI is, how AI works, or how to use complex AI tools provided by AI Verde through programming, we offer training workshops throughout the academic year at the U of A DataLab. Learn more about the various workshops and which ones are right for you.
- If you are not sure how AI can be used to solve some of your research problems, email verde-support@cyverse.org to reach the AI Verde team. Our AI experts can consult with you to determine how AI Verde can help.
- When your department wants to learn how AI can be leveraged, our AI team of experts can provide consultation. Email verde-support@cyverse.org to reach the AI Verde team.
- For faculty who want to create a chatbot trained on their course material, contact us at verde-support@cyverse.org and we can show you how AI Verde can help.
For questions from U of A faculty, staff, or researcher for using AI Verde for a course or research, email verde-support@cyverse.org. Students who want access to AI-Verde, email RII-DataScienceInstitute@arizona.edu.
Yes. Learn how AI Verde can support academia and research. Find a comprehensive list of all AI Verde features in the research paper, "AI-VERDE : A Gateway for Egalitarian Access to Large Language, Model-Based Resources for Educational Institutions" by Paul Mithun, Enrique Noriega-Atala, Nirav Merchant, and Edwin Skidmore. When using AI Verde for your research, please use this citation.