The Department of Computer Science has officially opened the Hargrove AI Lab, a new teaching and research space on the fourth floor of Hargrove Hall. The lab gives the MSc Artificial Intelligence a permanent home and provides GPU capacity for student thesis projects, seminar work and faculty research.
“Until now our students trained models wherever they could find spare compute — on laptops, in the cloud, overnight on borrowed workstations,” said Dr. Kenji Tanaka, who directs the MSc programme. “The Hargrove AI Lab changes that. Every thesis student gets scheduled GPU time, and the practicals for CS310 Machine Learning and CS420 Natural Language Processing now run on the same hardware stack they will meet in industry.”
The lab also hosts a weekly open evening where students from all departments can bring their own projects — from Marine Biology students training species classifiers to Business students prototyping forecasting tools.
The space was funded by the Hargrove endowment and a regional innovation grant, and was refitted over the summer break.