Illinois Chat is launched for campus community

(Press-News.org) What began as a student project in 2023 will now serve a whole university community.

Illinois Chat, an official artificial intelligence (AI) software tool of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has launched for the Fall 2025 semester and is available for anyone on campus. In partnership with the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Illinois Computes, NCSA developed Illinois Chat to offer large language model (LLM) abilities to the entire campus community.

This campus-developed tool allows users to create personalized LLM-based chatbots – similar to commercial options like ChatGPT – but with more control over their functions and content, meaning more security and less risk. By utilizing their own data focused on their intended audience, users can implement Illinois Chat to act as a 24/7 teaching assistant for professors, scrape campus websites to find needed resources or help organize research data.

And more.

“The Office of the CIO is excited to partner with NCSA, Illinois Computes and the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning to turn the idea for a potential revolutionary tool into a reality,” said Associate Director for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships Nick Vance. “With Illinois Chat, the campus community can access the same capabilities as commercial options but with the added control and assurance of a locally controlled environment.”

 

NCSA Helps Turn Ideas into Outcomes
The development process for Illinois Chat began more than two years ago when student researchers Kastan Day, Rohan Marwaha and Asmita Dabholkar at the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation (CAII) set to work on creating their own chatbot platform to serve as an AI-based teaching assistant for computer engineering classes.

However, the team quickly realized that the platform could be used for much more. As new applications emerged, new functionality was added. The small team of three quickly grew to a dozen, incorporating contributions from many other students working in CAII, including Joshua Min, Ruixin Han, Max Lindsey, Neha Sheth, Heather Broome, Vira Kasprova, Akylai Kasymkulova, Jack Bai and Aryan Sachdev. While the initial development of Illinois Chat was primarily supported by CAII, other campus partners and programs started contributing to its development, including the CIO, AIFARMS, Gies College of Business, Illinois Computes, NCSA’s Healthcare Innovation Program Office and the Strategic Instructional Innovations Program in the Grainger College of Engineering.

“The project began as an effort to automate a task that had traditionally been difficult to achieve: replicating the role of a human teaching assistant,” said Volodymyr Kindratenko, director of CAII and research associate professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. “Initially, we thought we could train an LLM on course materials, such as textbooks and lecture notes, so it could answer student questions. However, this approach proved too complex and not easily scalable for every course that might want an AI-based teaching assistant.

“Instead, we turned to a relatively new technique called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which works with LLMs to deliver content-specific chatbot responses. Our first product (uiuc.chat) quickly became popular among researchers and teachers exploring generative AI in the classroom and beyond. We’ve been refining the platform ever since.”

As the user base and potential applications began to grow, members of NCSA’s software team led by Luigi Marini were looped in to re-engineer the platform’s infrastructure components and user interface to make it more performant and robust, and give it the University of Illinois look and feel. In 2025, Technology Services and Illinois Computes embarked on making the platform into a campus-wide service.

Marwaha, now a research software engineer at NCSA and the lead developer of Illinois Chat, reflected on the long journey of building this tool for the campus community.

“Two years ago, we were building chatbots for individual courses and quickly saw the same need across teaching, research and operations,” Marwaha said. “Instead of another general chat app, we built a platform so people can create personalized assistants with campus security and answers grounded in their sources. Then they can share them with their audience. I believe this will revolutionize education and research at Illinois.

“We engineered Illinois Chat so anyone can assemble a capable AI assistant in minutes. You choose the sources, the tone and the audience. It is your AI, for your work.”

 

Adding to Illinois Computes Resource List
Of course, Illinois Chat is one of many resources NCSA offers to university researchers and the campus community as a whole. Illinois Computes provides computing and data storage resources, technical expertise and support services to researchers from all domains across the Illinois campus, while removing barriers for all researchers to access NCSA’s growing assemblage of research computing tools and world-class staff, furthering their innovative and novel work.

NCSA strives to play a leading role in developing AI platforms for the campus, relying on the potent blend of administration and development support through Illinois Computes.

“The partnership between NCSA and Technology Services on Illinois Chat shows what we can accomplish for campus when we combine cutting-edge research and development skills at NCSA with Tech Services’ expertise and experience in running campus-wide services,” said Director of Illinois Computes Chuck Thompson. “We believe this is only the beginning of what we can deliver for our campus.”

 

Immediate Impact
CAII and the Healthcare Innovation Program Office at NCSA have also partnered with Vyriad to implement Illinois Chat into the platform, providing broader access than Vyriad can currently mobilize to enable the review of relevant virus-related or virus-adjacent literature. Donald B. Gillies Professor in Computer Science Vikram Adve and his team have also utilized Illinois Chat effectively at AIFARMS.

Kindratenko and Illinois Chat have already been honored with an Innovative Tool Award by Instructure, the maker of Canvas LMS. The Academic Excellence Awards recognize exceptional educators and programs worldwide for remarkable achievements in teaching, learning and innovation.

“I have been using the platform in my ECE 408 courses since we launched its first prototype in Fall 2023,” Kindratenko said. “Over the four semesters it has been in use, students have asked more than 22,000 questions. In recent semesters, many colleagues across different departments have also adopted the platform and provided valuable feedback to make it more practical for both faculty and students. Other current applications include serving as a technical assistant for NCSA’s Delta and DeltaAI supercomputers and enabling researchers to interact with the entire open-access PubMed repository of biomedical articles, among others.”

ABOUT NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing, expertise and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use innovative resources to address research challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been assisting many of the world’s industry giants for over 35 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

ABOUT ILLINOIS COMPUTES
Illinois Computes offers computing and data storage resources, technical expertise and support services to researchers from all domains across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Through the campus-funded program, NCSA will learn what additional assets are needed to fulfill the computing demands of the university and adjust the cyberinfrastructure strategy while continuing to make access to systems, interdisciplinary and technical knowledge, and support infrastructure easy to obtain. Illinois Computes removes barriers for all Illinois researchers – especially those typically underserved – to access NCSA’s growing assemblage of research computing tools and world-class staff, furthering their innovative and novel work while ensuring NCSA is a leader in the global research community.

Check out the Illinois Computes website and sign up for the monthly newsletter for more information.

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