DMSB AI Strategic Hub

The D'Amore-McKim AI Strategic Hub (DASH) positions our school as a leader in artificial intelligence and human interaction. We created DASH to integrate intelligent technologies throughout D'Amore-McKim's curriculum, research, corporate outreach, and societal contributions. It aims to drastically upscale our scholarship and experiential learning abilities in AI in four strategic areas: AI for Research, AI for Teaching, AI for Business, and AI for Good.

The ultimate purpose of DASH is to accelerate social good through technology and leadership, and artificial intelligence plays a key role in making that happen. The work we're doing matters because it demystifies AI–we find that when people know how AI works and how it can work for them, they can more readily assess the need to adopt AI-based solutions.

For instance, we have found that when you compare how AI performs with and without human involvement, we can learn when to use AI and when not. This is important because we believe that we shouldn't have the default attitude that “AI is always better.” We should give AI a fair chance to succeed and to fail, just as we give humans a fair chance to succeed and to fail. DASH has found special protocols that compare AI, human, and hybrid performance among the best ways to decide how organizations should use AI. We enhance research productivity by providing AI resources and pedagogical productivity by understanding how AI enhances student learning.

DASH built a local compute box to enable our faculty to experiment and apply AI capabilities rapidly. While Northeastern University is a leader in AI research and has amazing computing resources, with over 50,000 CPU cores and over 500 GPUs in our Discovery compute cluster, research can often be jump-started with just a fraction of this hardware. The DASH_Box is a desktop with RAM and a GPU. It's bigger and more powerful than what most people have on their laptops or desktops, and it's less complicated than the cloud.

During the 2024-25 academic year, DASH has been helping to build the foundation necessary for everyone at D'Amore-McKim to learn and use AI. To date, we have focused primarily on research and teaching, and this report highlights those activities and their impact. Here, you will find information about specific research, teaching uses, success stories, and general faculty and student learning opportunities.