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), Chris Hemme (INBRE Bioinformatics Core Coordinator, College of Pharmacy) 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
IACR seed funding program is back! - I’m really happy to report that over FY ’25, ~70 submitted proposals included the CCR as an affiliated Center/Institute and historically we have averaged a ~50% acceptance rate. Thank YOU for your strong support. Today, we are continuing one of our key programs that invests these indirect cost return funds back into the URI computational […]
Fall ’25 AI/ML Seminars - The full schedule for a Fall semester AI/ML seminar series is developing! Please find the details here: https://web.uri.edu/iacr/seminars/ The first seminar this semester is by Scott Field from UMass Dartmouth on “Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Modeling Orbital Dynamics in Binary Black Hole Systems“. Hope to see you there!
URI gets nod in LIGO media blitz! - Our own computational researchers Deborah Ferguson, Derek Davis and Rob Coyne are credited in LIGO’s 10th anniversary of the first detection media blitz! https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/ten-years-later-ligo-is-a-black-hole-hunting-machineand even the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/science/gravitational-waves-ligo-black-holes.htmlAnd here as well .. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ringing-black-hole-test-hawking-kerr Congratulations folks! Wow!!- 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/