AI platform LUCA
On the secure platform LUCA (Leiden University Cognitive Agent), you as a teacher have the opportunity to experiment with conditioning specific chatbots for the students following your courses.
Sources can be uploaded to the bot, which are used to compose its answers in chats with students. These sources can be publicly accessible websites, lecture slides, syllabuses, transcripts of weblectures etc. Using templates that are designed for using chatbots in education, you can provide the bot with learning outcomes and specify how the interaction with students should take place. Lecturers can access and analyse the anonymised conversation history between the bot and the students. It is also possible to create a sandbox environment in which students can create their own bots in the context of their course.
Safety and environmental impact
The data that go to and from the AI model are not used to further train the AI model. The AI models (currently one can choose from ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-4.1 and ChatGPT-5) run in Sweden within Leiden University's Microsoft environment. While these models have been developed by the company OpenAI, they do not run there and no data is shared with the company OpenAI.
The ISSC is working on making the environmental impact visible for all users. At the moment, we can say only the following about this:
- The AI is hosted in data centers in Sweden which use only CO2 neutral energy, specifically hydro and wind.
- The data centers are cooled without the use of surface, ground or drinking water.
Questions
Questions about LUCA can be addressed to ECOLe via ecole@hum.leidenuniv.nl or via +31 (0)71 527 2773, option 2. It is also possible to set up an appointment to discuss your questions, online via Teams or on campus.