College of Business

Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory

Name: Auburn University at Montgomery
Address: 7430 East Drive, Montgomery, AL, 36117, US
Telephone: 334-244-3000

The Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory is where the College of Business puts AI to work. It pairs NVIDIA GPU computing, housed in AUM’s secure data center and reachable from anywhere on campus, with a studio in Clement Hall built for immersive training, applied research, and content creation. Students in the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence, the Master of Science in Management Information Systems, the undergraduate AI minor, and the college’s graduate AI certificates use the lab to move a project from a business question to a governed, working system.

The lab is also a resource for business, government, and nonprofit organizations across the River Region that want a disciplined answer to a simple question: should we use AI for this, and if so, how?

What Students Learn Here

Every project that runs through the lab, whether a graduate practicum, an honors thesis, or a partner engagement, follows the same four stages. They are the learning goals of the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence, and they are what employers ask for.

Position AI to deliver business and societal value
Before anyone trains a model, students decide whether AI is the right tool. They compare an AI approach with rules-based and conventional solutions on cost, complexity, risk, and value; produce a go/no-go assessment covering business, data, and implementation feasibility, with success criteria, ROI assumptions, and a corporate-responsibility review; and recommend KPIs that tie model performance to organizational outcomes, scoped to a realistic first iteration.
Assess, prepare, and document data
Students inventory and audit data for completeness, accuracy, consistency, timeliness, representativeness, and legality; build reproducible pipelines for cleaning, transformation, feature engineering, and leakage-safe train/validation/test splits; and document labeling strategy, data lineage, and the privacy and consent constraints on how a dataset may be used.
Build and evaluate AI systems
On the lab’s GPU systems, students select and justify a modeling approach against data, interpretability needs, and compute constraints; compare simple baselines with more complex candidates; use cross-validation, hyperparameter tuning, and experiment tracking so results can be reproduced and compared; and evaluate models for performance, subgroup bias, robustness to shifted or adversarial inputs, and explainability, with metrics tied to the business cost of errors.
Operationalize and govern AI responsibly
Students design how a model fits an organizational workflow: deployment setting, system interfaces, human oversight, security, performance, and cost. They write monitoring and maintenance plans with thresholds and actions for drift, alerting, escalation, retraining, rollback, and retirement, and they establish governance controls that assign accountability and document transparency, privacy, compliance, and audit needs against relevant policies, standards, and regulations.

Artificial Intelligence Research Lab

In the Media

“AI will accelerate the expansion of human knowledge”
– Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s founder and CEO

“AI pays off when humans and machines are partners, not substitutes.”
– Dr. Jeffrey Bohler, Associate Dean of the AUM COB.

Our faculty and students approach inquiry and problem-solving with fearlessness and creativity. Through our research and industry engagement, we are uniquely positioned to help public and private sector organizations tackle important questions and solve complex challenges through the ethical and strategic use of AI. Additionally, our faculty can help eliminate unfounded fears about AI by helping media separate fact from fiction in their reporting.

What happens in the lab

GPU computing for College of Business students and faculty
The lab’s NVIDIA DGX systems live in AUM’s data center for security and climate control. You reach them from any computer on campus through a web-based notebook environment or a secure shell session. Accounts are issued by AUM Information Technology Services; the lab is where you get oriented, learn the environment, and leave with a project running. Faculty can request accounts for a whole class.
Applied AI consultations for regional organizations
Bring a question about your data and leave with a go/no-go assessment. Faculty and graduate students meet with partner organizations in the lab, work through stage one above with you, and, where the answer is yes, scope a first iteration that runs on the lab’s GPU systems. Past partners include Axis Recovery, a Birmingham healthcare organization whose hospitalization data became a graduate research project on cost and outcomes.
AI and virtual-reality communication research
The lab’s current flagship study asks whether AI-coached and VR-based practice improves communication skills faster than conventional methods. Participants are assigned to VR/AI training, an AI public-speaking coach, self-paced virtual speech practice, or a control group, then followed for six weeks. The study is itself an exercise in stages three and four: measured evaluation, human oversight, and consent.
Immersive training and headset checkout
The studio holds a set of virtual-reality headsets for course sessions and short-course delivery: practice presentations, sales calls, negotiations, and interviews with AI feedback. Faculty can book the room for a class period; employer partners can arrange sessions for their teams.
A studio for AI-literacy content
With a ring light, camera, large display, and green screen, the room doubles as a recording booth. Faculty record micro-lectures and demonstrations, students produce explainer videos and project presentations, and the lab builds teaching material on AI avatars, deepfakes, and media literacy.
Home base for student researchers and clubs
MS in AI and MS MIS project teams, honors thesis students, and the college’s AI and research clubs use the lab for working sessions, office hours, and an end-of-semester project showcase.
Faculty development
The lab hosts hands-on workshops for College of Business faculty on AI tools for teaching, research, and course design, so the college uses in its own classrooms what it teaches.

Our Lab Equipment

Equipment and Integration

The Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory wishes to thank NVIDIA and solutions provider Mark III Systems for their generous participation and partnership.

The Lab is proud to use a new generation of AI super-computing, the NVIDIA DGX Station A100. This dedicated resource provides maximum performance for multiple, simultaneous users anywhere in the world and offers data center technology without a data center or additional IT infrastructure.

Mark III Systems is a leading digital and IT transformation solutions provider with a long, rich history of providing “full stack” technology solutions to enterprises and service providers across North America.

Get In Touch

Contact Us

Ben Larson

Department Chair

Artificial Intelligence Research LaboratoryManagement Information Systems

Vickie Riley

Administrative Associate

Artificial Intelligence Research LaboratoryManagement Information Systems

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