AI-Powered Chatbot Now Available for Natural Hazards Researchers
Users can now "Ask AI" to explore DesignSafe datasets and use NHERI's multifaceted cyberinfrastructure
Published on March 12, 2026
The DesignSafe team is pleased to announce a new AI feature for the natural hazards research community on the NSF NHERI DesignSafe platform. From the upper-right of the NHERI DesignSafe website, users can now “Ask AI” about NHERI research and cyberinfrastructure capabilities. Developed by the DesignSafe team at UT Austin, the Ask AI chatbot is in early release beta version.
The team designed Ask AI to improve and streamline the user experience in two ways:
Enhanced Data Discovery
The Ask AI chatbot can answer questions about DesignSafe’s published datasets, making it easier than ever to explore and discover data available in the Data Depot Repository. The Ask AI algorithm provides targeted, relevant search returns – a significant improvement over simple database searches.
User Guide & Research Tools Support
The Ask AI chatbot also can answer questions based on the DesignSafe User Guides and the SimCenter applications documentation. Instead of paging through documentation for answers, researchers can employ Ask AI to quickly find specific answers about data curation, DesignSafe and SimCenter tools, use cases, and computational resources – including step-by-step instructions.
"With the rapid growth of data in the Data Depot and documentation across DesignSafe and SimCenter, we built Ask AI to help researchers cut through the noise – quickly surfacing the information most relevant to their work," says Ellen Rathje, DesignSafe-CI principal investigator.
Whether you're searching for published data, curating and publishing data, or navigating NHERI’s cyberinfrastructure research tools, the DesignSafe chatbot will accelerate research discovery and provide speedy answers to software questions. Once you try it, we think you will want to enlist Ask AI as your personal research assistant.
Questions? Contact Tim Cockerill, DesignSafe deputy project director.
Ask AI excels at answering specific questions about Data Depot datasets.
