Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette) offered the nation’s first master’s degree in computer science in 1959. Between 2012 and 2023, UL Lafayette led the Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI), the first National Science Foundation (NSF) Center in Louisiana’s history and NSF’s first industry-university center in data science. The university has focused on leveraging these assets and expertise for the past two years to develop the Center for Applied AI (CAAI) as the nation’s next center of excellence.
The Center for Applied AI (CAAI) is dedicated to pursuing use-driven AI research, training an AI-ready workforce, and creating a platform to accelerate innovation to support the local economy. The center is a hub where AI researchers and domain experts from diverse disciplines, industry specialists, and community stakeholders come together to address real-world challenges.
AI Research
The center actively drives AI development, focusing on real-world applications. Our research prioritizes trustworthy AI by ensuring privacy and security, addressing bias, enhancing human-AI collaboration, improving explainability and reliability, and fostering responsible innovation across various sectors.
AI4ALL WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette's AI4ALL workforce development program is breaking down barriers to entry in the field of artificial intelligence. The mission is to equip individuals from all backgrounds with in-demand AI skills, regardless of prior experience or educational attainment.
CAAI drives economic growth by fostering an ecosystem for innovation. It brings together computational infrastructure, AI expertise, diverse domain knowledge, industry/government partnerships, and workforce development programs to stimulate the emergence of new AI-powered businesses and startups. UL Lafayette plans to create a secure AI sandbox at the LITE Center to enable students, faculty, and local industry partners to experiment with open large language models like Meta’s Llama 3 locally. These local models mitigate security and privacy risks by ensuring that the data entered is not used to train public models.
University Centers
