What is an “AI lab”?

Late in 2024 the Kuleana.work coworking space (a federally recognized nonprofit) received a grant from the county to deliver education and associated programs about using generative AI technology to the people of Kauai. This means among the other work we do we have a mission to help the people of our community understand, work with, and use AI to improve their quality of life. In their work, with their businesses, at school, as they transition from one job to another, and in other ways as well.

We’ll do three things: research, education, and development, and to do these things, we built a laboratory. First, let’s talk about how those three efforts break down:

Research

We’ll do (we are doing) community research to discover how the people of Kauai are using AI; we want to know how our people are finding this tech, learning about it, how they’re using it (or not using it), they’re apprehensions, pain points, and success stories. While we’re gathering information on a broader scale about how people use AI, our discovery focus is on the people of Kauai. We have two professional user/social researchers on staff who are developing an ongoing slate of efforts. We’ll use surveys, contextual inquiries, and literature reviews to help us understand how people are using this tech. We’ll use this knowledge to inform how we develop materials to educate our community.

Education

We’ll deliver what we learn to the public in the form of downloadable reports, public-invited research readouts, how-to workshops, a newsletter, and knowledge “briefs” here on the website. Obviously we feel very passionate about helping those on our island meet this new challenge, understand this game-changing technology. We feel people who don’t understand how AI is evolving and changing and how it’s capabilities are developing will be left behind, and we want to help keep that from happening here on Kauai.

Development

We’re also constantly working with different AI models and solutions as they emerge, and part of this work is developing custom AI solutions - GPTs, NLM projects, and a local model trained on data from our island - to show our community what’s possible, make some (inevitable) mistakes so we can caution you, and help you develop your own solutions. We make these developments accessible via workshops and links here on the website.

Our lab

Fortunately, we already have a quiet, work-focused physical space to do all these things… our coworking space, and we’ve done a bunch of things to set up a lab:

• put together some dedicated space

• built our or library of reference materials

• subscribed to frontier LLM offerings

• acquired a high-end computer for local model development

• we’ve put together protocols for research here on Kauai and started executing on those

• and we’ve started cataloging our results and formatting them for delivery to the public.

So when we say “AI lab” this is what we mean: a physical place where research and development takes place, a place you can go to learn, and an online presence that acts as a clearinghouse for information and expertise.

Stay tuned to this blog for all our offerings, and check our calendar for office hours, research readouts, and workshops this month.