AI Infrastructure Special Interest Group
Overview & Focus
The One U Responsible AI Infrastructure Special Interest Group (RAI SIG) brings together practitioners, engineers, researchers, and policymakers working at the intersection of infrastructure and responsible AI development. Our primary focus is to explore, design, define, and share regional needs and best practices in infrastructure strategies that support transparency, fairness, security, audibility, and accountability in AI systems at scale.
We aim to build a forum where key stakeholders can:
- Define infrastructure needs for supporting Utah’s training, research, industrial, and government AI ecosystem.
- Share implementation strategies from industry, academia, and open-source communities.
- Showcase tools and practices that enable ethical AI development across the full model lifecycle.
Assemble a regional cadre of experts in the practical use of AI infrastructure.
Key Activities & Timeline
Activity | Status | Description |
SIG Kickoff and Strategy Discussion | ✅ Ongoing | Introduce SIG goals, roadmap, and member collaboration structure. |
Hackathon Series | ✅ Ongoing | Inaugural Hackathon, supported by OneURAI, Amazon Web Services, and Utah State: A Breath of Fresh Air: AI Hackathon |
Presentation Series: RAI Infrastructure in Practice | ✅ Ongoing | Monthly virtual presentations from leading RAI practitioners and researchers (see highlights below). |
RAI Infrastructure Landscape Mapping | 🟡 Ongoing | Working group effort to catalog existing tooling, gaps, and priorities across model development, evaluation, and deployment pipelines. |
Model Evaluation Benchmarking Workshop | 🟢 Upcoming | Hands-on workshop to explore reproducible RAI benchmarking with open-source tooling. |
SIG White Paper (Q4 2025) | 🟢 Upcoming | Planned collaborative paper outlining foundational components of scalable RAI infrastructure. |
Presentation Highlights
Our monthly talk series showcases in-depth, practical perspectives on responsible AI infrastructure. The following are selected highlights:
✅ "ARUP Labs and Pathology Foundation Models"
Speaker: Brendan O’Fallon, ARUP Labs
Focus: Brendan presented on the ARUP team’s work-in-progress on a foundation model for hematopathology. Hematopathology is the study of blood disorders, and often involves examination of bone marrow, peripheral blood, and other tissues with light microscopy. Currently, most of the basic analyses are very manual and require pathologists to manually count cells, estimate stain percentages, and scan tissue for abnormal cells. My team is creating a large vision transformer model that (we hope) will have general capabilities for identifying abnormal cells, tissues, stains, and other features of interest.
✅ "GPU accelerated Alpha Fold for Protein Interaction Screens"
Speaker: Justin Bosch, University of Utah Genetics
Focus: Justin presented on how his team is using AlphaFold to perform large-scale in-silico protein interaction screens at the University of Utah Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC). Topics included: the general importance of this approach and how his lab is using it to study hormones and human genetic variation and Justin also shared insights from his lab’s real-world experiences with CHPC’s computing infrastructure, including comparisons of AlphaFold on 17 different GPUs, how protein size affects GPU choice, struggles to take full advantage of GPU resources at the CHPC, and rationale behind future GPU purchasing decisions.
✅ "Pending"
Speaker: Vivek Srikumar, University of Utah, CS
Focus:
✅ "Pending"
Speaker: Jim Stewart, Utah Education Network
Focus:
✅ "Pending"
Speaker: Martin Cuma, Center for High Performance Computing, UofU
Focus:
Highlights and Opportunities
- Presentations have been well-attended and draw participation from cross-functional roles: ML engineers, policy teams, infrastructure architects, and open-source contributors.
- Creation of a “Use Case” description sight to give the ecosystem an idea of what is happening in Utah that would gain by having significant infrastructure available
Next Steps & How to Get Involved
- We welcome new members interested in shaping responsible AI through infrastructure innovation.
- The SIG is actively recruiting contributors for our white paper working group and upcoming workshop sessions.
- We're also happy to support outreach to previous speakers for content if you'd like to feature their talks more broadly.
👉 Contact: Greg Jones, Sara McLaughlin, Jim Stewart, SIG Organizers
📧 Email: Greg Jones <gjones@nvidia.com>, Sara McLaughlin Wynn <mcwynn@amazon.com>, Jim Stewart <jstewart@uen.org>
Upcoming Events and Engagements
AI Infrastructure SIG meetings are typically held via Zoom from 9:00-10:00 on the first Friday of the month. View the calendar for meeting dates.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://utah.zoom.us/j/96482452441
Meeting ID: 964 8245 2441
Passcode: 812113
Members





