AI Forge

Purdue's AI Forge is both a principle and an initiative aimed at providing Purdue's undergraduate and master's students with advanced skills in state-of-the-art generative AI techniques, taught by internationally recognized AI experts. The key principle of AI Forge is giving students agency, knowledge, and resources to allow them to forge their own path in AI.

AI Forge Skill-Building Course

This semester-long course provides students with hands-on knowledge on state-of-the-art foundation models for AI.

The skill-building course is intended for students seeking to develop capabilities in working with large language models (LLMs), including in-context learning, the design of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and the training and fine-tuning of AI models.

Prerequisites include proficiency in Python and a foundational background in probability, statistics, and linear algebra.

Students can enroll during open registration until May 29. Contact your advisor for more information.

Course number: CS 39000AIF (CRN 30535)
Meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11:30a-12:20p

AI Forge Project Course

AI Forge projects give students the chance to apply artificial intelligence to real-world challenges. From sustainability and healthcare to creative technologies and smart systems, each project is designed to be hands-on, collaborative and impact-driven.

Students work in teams guided by faculty and industry mentors to move ideas from concept to prototype, gaining real experience in research, design and responsible AI development along the way.

The hands-on project course is intended for students who already have experience in AI, such as through CS 390AIF, CS 373, CS 471, CS 490NLP, or CS 577, and are ready to apply their skills to real-world challenges. In addition to meeting the course prerequisites, participants are expected to have prior hands-on experience with AI concepts or tools.

Apply for the AI Forge Project Course here

Person sitting in front of having a planning and analyzing with display screen and pointing on the data. (Adobe Stock)

Aligning Risk/Opportunity Preferences with Agent's Decision Making Behavior in the Financial Domain

This project explored whether large language models (LLMs) can reason about real investor behavior and connect it to declared risk preferences. Using a unique dataset that combines survey responses, trading history, and market data from European stock exchanges, students investigated whether AI models can identify investors preferences based on their investment actions. Initial experiments show that predicting an investor’s risk level from their trading behavior is surprisingly difficult, highlighting an opportunity for more advanced AI reasoning. The team proposed and implemented an LLM-based approach for identifying relevant risk-aligned behavioral patterns from raw data and showed that models learning over these patterns can significantly better predict investors’ preferences in real-world market conditions.

Chimpanzee sitting on a branch (Adobe Stock)

SimianSight: Multi-modal Vision-Language Model Framework to Monitor and Predict Ape Behaviors

Wildlife conservation efforts require constant monitoring of habitat conditions, which can be too costly to do at the needed scale. Recent advances in multimodal AI system have the potential to significantly lower that cost through automation. This project explored the first steps in this process - whether AI models can be used to better understand animal behavior in the wild. Unlike past work that relies on manually annotated data for training visual detection systems, this project uses a multi-modal foundation model, analyzing chimpanzee behavior in videos without additional data. Through careful analysis of the model’s capabilities, the students designed a multiple-step reasoning strategy for identifying complex social interactions, emotional cues, and behavioral patterns. Experiments comparing our reasoning strategies to traditional prompting show a more than 20% reduction in model prediction error.

AI Forge

AI Forge Skill-Building Course

AI Forge Project Course

Past AI Forge Projects

Aligning Risk/Opportunity Preferences with Agent's Decision Making Behavior in the Financial Domain

SimianSight: Multi-modal Vision-Language Model Framework to Monitor and Predict Ape Behaviors

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