On Monday, Oct. 13, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivered the NVIDIA DGX Spark. Gonick was among a select group of AI leaders, which also included will.i.am – the tech entrepreneur and global musician behind FYI.AI, an AI-powered productivity tool.
Last month, ASU announced will.i.am’s appointment as a professor of practice to teach a new AI course, The Agentic Self, offered through The GAME School. The collaboration will also support the development of EDU.FYI, an education-focused extension of FYI.AI built on NVIDIA technology.
Related story: will.i.am to teach ASU class on agentic AI via ASU News
Gonick received the NVIDIA DGX Spark via SPARK-E, a Unitree Go2 robotic dog from ASU’s School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI). The AI-powered robodog is part of a research initiative supporting search-and-rescue and assistance for the visually impaired.
The robodog delivery embodies one of the many AI research labs on ASU campus, Gonick noted. Among one of the first to actually unbox the NVIDIA DGX Spark, Gonick shared his impressions: “Obviously it's turbocharged on the inside but it's also gorgeous.”
Two teams at ASU have received the NVIDIA DGX Spark as part of the early release. These include Associate Professor ‘YZ’ Yezhou Yang from SCAI and the university’s AI Acceleration team.
AI to support research for social good
Yang’s work focuses on ensuring that “AI plays a role to improve social good.” As the head of the Active Perception Group (APG) lab, he leads student researchers exploring AI applications in imaging, visualization and multimodal large language models.
ASU doctoral students Kaustav Chanda and Haoming Li, pictured above with the new NVIDIA DGX Spark, are among those advancing this work. One project uses AI to support memory care for aging populations through a chatbot that engages users in soothing, personalized conversations and can generate helpful images. The APG team collaborates with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and Mirabella at ASU.
Other projects include improving transportation safety and developing energy-efficient generative AI models.
Yang said his team is eager to explore new possibilities with the NVIDIA DGX Spark. “We’re super excited,” he said. “Hearing that new computing power is coming to ASU and will be available to researchers is music to our ears.”
CreateAI powers AI innovations at ASU
ASU’s AI Acceleration team, part of Enterprise Technology, has built the technical foundation to support AI at scale across the university. Central to this effort is CreateAI, ASU’s own AI toolkit that offers generative capabilities for faculty, staff and students.
Built by ASU, for ASU, CreateAI resides in the university’s secure, governed infrastructure. The toolkit allows users to design custom AI experiences through CreateAI Builder, with access to nearly 50 large language models to align the right AI model for the right idea.
Faculty and students are already designing over 3,000 AI experiences using CreateAI Builder. For example, students in ASU instructor Naomi Ellis’ AI in Fashion course created their own AI-experiences — such as brand bots and sustainable shopping guides.
AI Acceleration Engineer Siddharth Jain said the team plans to use the NVIDIA DGX Spark to make AI more accessible and relevant to higher education. They are training an AI model tailored to university-related topics so CreateAI can deliver more accurate and useful answers.
“[NVIDIA] DGX Spark will help us build AI tools that speak the language of ASU,” said Jain during the unboxing on Monday.
In addition to CreateAI, the ASU community also has access to industry leading tools — including Adobe Express, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu, Google’s NotebookLM and more.
