Applied AI Labs

The lab exists so that students, faculty and industry professionals can build the technologies the energy industry's growing dependence on data requires, in one place and on real problems. Its three lines of work are AI predictive analytics, AI visual inspection and machine learning for health and safety, and its XR Network programme extended that work into the industrial metaverse with NVIDIA and TechnipFMC.

The lab runs an AI Sandbox where manufacturing solutions are tested and refined before they reach a factory floor. Collaborative robots handle assembly and quality inspection, vision systems learn to catch defects a line worker would miss, and predictive maintenance models are trained on live IoT sensor data. Every solution goes through staged testing in the sandbox before full-scale deployment, a level of rigour that vendor demonstrations rarely match.

Run with Penn State, this lab develops AI that lives at the manufacturing edge rather than in the cloud. Its research centres on Smart PLCs, giving the programmable logic controllers that already run production lines the ability to make decisions locally, in milliseconds, without a round trip to a data centre. It is foundational work, and it determines whether edge AI delivers real operational value.

This lab operates inside real city environments rather than a closed facility, working with city officials, urban planners and residents on traffic optimisation, public safety, resource management and disaster preparedness. Its flagship effort is the National AI Video Analytics Program, built with DePaul University's data science group and deployed with the City of Brookhaven, which turns ordinary municipal video into planning insight cities can act on.

The lab combines AI with mixed and virtual reality so that expertise reaches the frontline worker wherever they are. A specialist can see what a technician sees on a platform offshore, mark up the view and be gone in ten minutes rather than on a flight in two days. The work grew out of the consortium's Connected Workers programme in oil and gas, where safety is the first requirement and productivity follows from it.

The consortium's incubator model was first proven at the University of Louisville, where the InnovaLab opened inside the College of Business with AWS, GE Appliances and Amgen among its launch partners. Its industry-specific incubators gave pharmaceutical, energy, financial and manufacturing companies a practical platform to take AI concepts from idea to working prototype, and it is the reason Dean Jeff Guan describes the university as having become a centre of knowledge dissemination.