Introducing CERIT-SC AI Tools: Smart, Secure, and Ready for Research

Artificial Intelligence is becoming a vital tool in modern research and scientific innovation. At CERIT-SC, we now offer AI services tailored specifically for the academic community—powerful, user-friendly, and fully under your control. Our new Open WebUI platform provides secure, on-premise access to advanced language models for chatting, coding, document processing, and image generation. The interface supports multiple languages, including Czech. For developers and research teams, the same models are accessible via a documented REST API.

From a technical standpoint, we offer a stable set of large language models (such as LLaMA 3.3), as well as an experimental set that is subject to ongoing evaluation and updates. We are also open to model requests from research groups with specific needs—new models can be considered for inclusion based on interest and relevance.

Key Features:

Open WebUI Chat interface similar to popular AI chatbots
Combined web and arXiv search integrated with AI responses
Image generation
RAG (retrieve and generate) – upload documents and ask questions based on their content
OpenAI-compatible API – connect your own applications easily
Requires a valid MetaCenter account

While free commercial AI services are available and often excel in speed and Czech language support, they raise valid concerns regarding data privacy and third-party data leakage. Our AI services operate entirely within the secure e-INFRA CZ infrastructure—your data never leaves this environment. Learn more about data privacy.

For specialized user groups, we also offer prepaid access to commercial models like OpenAI or Anthropic through the same unified interface.

Extended AI Integration

Our JupyterHub environment, running in Kubernetes, includes the Notebook Intelligence extension, preconfigured to use our in-house models (such as Command-A). Users can easily switch to other models or APIs with their own API keys. Similarly, RStudio users can access AI functionality via the gpt-studio extension, also preconfigured and customizable.

AI-Powered Documentation

Our updated documentation portal (https://docs.e-infra.cz) features an AI-powered chatbot capable of answering questions based on the documentation, and in some cases, offering solutions to common infrastructure issues. This service is actively evolving, with new features being added regularly.