Welcome to the Institute for AI & Computational Research (IACR) at the University of Rhode Island — a collaboratively supported effort by central IT Services (ITS), the Vice President for Research’s Office, the Provost’s Office, and faculty contributions through research grants.
The Institute’s mission is to support, promote and grow high-level interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary computational research — artificial intelligence (AI), data science (Data), high-performance computing (HPC), and quantum computing (Quantum) — across URI campuses and in the region. The computational work of over 150 faculty researchers is supported by this Institute. A quick snapshot of IACR resources is available here: IACR at-a-glance.
The IACR has an internal advisory group of key URI faculty members: Drs. Chris Kincaid (Oceanography); Ying Zhang (Life Sciences), Jason Dwyer (Associate Dean, College of A&S) and Drew Zhang (Alfred J. Verrecchia Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Business Analytics) and is led by Gaurav Khanna (Asst. Vice President for Research Computing). The Institute partners closely with the Massachusetts High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). IACR was formerly known as the URI Center for Computational Research.
Email us at iacr-group@uri.edu with questions, comments, suggestions — anything!
News
Fall ’25 Workshops - The details of our Fall ’25 semester workshops appear below. These are open to faculty, staff, and students and are totally free. https://docs.unity.uri.edu/news/2025/08/uri-fall-25-workshops/They also appear on the URI events calendar (and subscribe): https://events.uri.edu/group/ai We have some relatively new workshop offerings on AI Tools and Bioinformatics. We also have a new workshop on MPI parallel computing […]
Summer ’25 AI Lab Student Projects - We are happy to share the wide variety of completed student projects in the AI Lab over Summer ’25: https://web.uri.edu/iacr/ai-lab-projects-summer-25/
Major Unity Upgrade! - We have just completed a major expansion to the URI portion of Unity. This was funded via a federal grant that we were fortunate enough to receive. Here are the details of the hardware expansion: With this expansion, we have added 1,600+ CPU cores — this could not have come at a better time since we have […]
NSF and NVIDIA partner for open AI models - https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-nvidia-partnership-enables-ai2-develop-fully-open-ai
Dr. Hendawi’s research spotlighted in The Guardian! - Congratulations to our very own Dr. Hendawi!https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/09/open-ai-chat-gpt5-energy-use If you’re curious about the carbon cost of AI or passionate about sustainable tech, give the published paper a read and share your thoughts!