Emerging Technologies’ AI: Community of Practice (AICoP) is a multidisciplinary gathering of curious minds exploring the practical applications of artificial intelligence across Columbia University. The community provides a platform for learning, discussion, and experimentation—helping to demystify AI, encourage exploration, and foster inclusive collaboration.
February's session welcomes Curtis Burkhalter, Ph.D., Technical Marketing Manager at HP, for a discussion on the growing role of local AI infrastructure in academic environments. This conversation will examine how edge computing and on-premise AI systems can support research, teaching, and administrative work while addressing institutional priorities such as data governance, cost control, reproducibility, and academic freedom.
Agenda
- The Case for Local AI in Higher Ed
- Why edge compute matters for research and teaching, including considerations around data governance, cost predictability, reproducibility, and academic freedom.
- The Hardware Shift
- What has changed architecturally to make local AI workstations viable—covering unified memory, the GB10 Superchip, and the ZGX Nano form factor.
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Use Cases That Matter
Three deep-dive scenarios:
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Privacy-preserving clinical NLP
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Humanities corpus analysis
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Departmental AI infrastructure for teaching
- Live Demo
- A full walkthrough of a polypharmacy application running on the ZGX Nano, demonstrating local inference, data privacy, and real-world clinical relevance.
- Discussion & Q&A
- Open discussion, use case brainstorming, and next steps for faculty interested in exploring specific applications.
Meeting Details
Date: February 27th
Time: 9:30 AM - 10:30 AM
You will need a Zoom account to join the session. If you do NOT already have a Zoom account, visit columbiauniversity.zoom.us and Sign in with your UNI to create your basic Zoom account.