Colorado Sustainability Hub
A statewide sustainability-data platform integrating AI, geospatial systems, and natural language interaction
About the Project
The Colorado Sustainability Hub is a transformative statewide digital infrastructure initiative that consolidates sustainability and well-being data from across Colorado into a unified, accessible, and interactive platform. By enabling intuitive access to complex data, the project fosters collaboration among community members, policymakers, and researchers, empowering them to engage with and draw actionable insights from regionally relevant information.
The project supports researchers, policymakers, and community members by making complex information easier to find, interpret, and use through community-driven design, natural language processing, geospatial integration, and advanced data workflows.
Project Goals
- Centralized Data Accessibility - A comprehensive online platform aggregating sustainability and well-being data from diverse sources
- User-Centric Design - Platform tailored to user needs through community engagement and participatory design
- Community-Driven Research - A shared resource where community members can contribute, curate data, and collaborate
- Educational Enhancement - Hands-on learning opportunities for undergraduate students across partner institutions
- Advanced Data Aggregation - Natural language processing and machine learning for conversational AI interfaces
- Evidence-Based Decision-Making - Tools for community planning, economic development, and environmental stewardship
- Enhancing Community Well-Being - Actionable, accessible sustainability data for Colorado communities
Bili: AI-Powered Sustainability Assistant
Bili is now in Beta! Try out our AI-powered sustainability assistant and help shape its development.
Bili is an AI-powered chatbot that provides access to Colorado’s publicly available economic, ecological, and social data related to environmental stewardship. Users can submit environmental queries to Bili, which uses large language models to provide research-backed answers about topics like climate impacts on Colorado.
BiliCore Framework
The team released BiliCore, an open-source framework for evaluating large language models in sustainability contexts. BiliCore provides:
- Modular tools for automated testing and benchmarking
- Prompt template management
- Model-switching experiments
- API-based evaluation capabilities
BiliCore enables objective comparisons across varied tasks and intents, informing model selection for the Hub. It was presented at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting and accepted as Late-Breaking Work at ACM COMPASS 2025.
Publications
- Pittman, D., Williams, A., Haring, K., Salo, J., Newman, G., Kennedy, A., Newman, S., & Kalevela, S. (2025). Co-Creating a Regional Sustainability Hub: Conversational AI, Community Engagement, and Local Data for Computing in Place. ACM COMPASS 2025.
Platform Architecture
The Hub incorporates modern data engineering and AI technologies:
- Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
- LangChain for retrieval pipelines and tool interactions
- LangGraph for managing structured agent flows
- PostGIS-backed geospatial database for location-based data
- MongoDB for flexible data storage
- MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js) for the web application
- Accessibility-focused design with mobile-first, responsive interfaces
Partner Institutions
The Sustainability Hub is a collaborative effort across five Colorado universities:
Metropolitan State University of Denver (Lead Institution)
Principal Investigator:
- Dr. Daniel Pittman, Associate Professor of Computer Science - Overall project coordination, NLP/ML development, knowledge graph generation
Project Staff:
- Alyssa Williams - Project Manager
University of Denver
Co-Principal Investigator:
- Dr. Kerstin Haring - User-Centered Design, Human-Computer Interaction, natural language search interfaces
University of Northern Colorado
Co-Principal Investigator:
- Dr. Jessica Salo - Data Democratization, geospatial data discovery and integration, GIS expertise
Colorado State University Fort Collins
Co-Principal Investigator:
- Dr. Gregory Newman - Community Engagement lead, citizen science, web platform development
Senior Personnel:
- Dr. Alexis Kennedy - Public policy and administration, stakeholder outreach
- Dr. Sarah Newman - Research support and coordination
- Dr. Elicia Ratajczyk - Environmental social science, complex adaptive systems
- Dr. Jennifer Cross - Team science coaching, collaborative session facilitation
- Dr. Matthew Hitt - Social science methods, evaluation planning, community engagement strategy
Colorado State University Pueblo
Co-Principal Investigator:
- Dr. Sylvester Kalevela - Southern Colorado community engagement and outreach
Community Engagement
The project has conducted extensive statewide engagement:
- Statewide survey distributed to over 1,000 stakeholders with 105 responses
- Asset mapping identifying 1,200+ sustainability-focused organizations across five regions
- Customer discovery interviews exploring user expectations and regional needs
- Esri StoryMaps illustrating sustainability concepts and chatbot use cases
Funding
National Science Foundation
The primary funding for this project comes from the NSF CISE-MSI Research Expansion Program (Award #2318730, $1,202,085). The CISE-MSI program aims to broaden participation by increasing CISE-funded research projects led by Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs).
Learn more about the CISE-MSI program
NAIRR Pilot Program
The project also received support from the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot program (Allocation NAIRR240197), providing cloud computing credits for AI development:
- AWS Credits: $41,678 for ETL pipelines, SageMaker ML training, Bedrock LLM services
- Azure Credits: $25,200 for Azure OpenAI model training and deployment
These resources support the development of Bili’s RAG system and enable comparison of LLM capabilities across cloud platforms for sustainability data processing.
Student Involvement
More than 25 undergraduate and graduate students from five partner institutions have contributed to the project, gaining experience in:
- Data engineering and pipeline development
- Machine learning and NLP prototyping
- Geospatial analysis and GIS data curation
- User interface and UX design
- Literature reviews and LLM evaluation
- Community engagement and stakeholder outreach
Student Presentations
Students have presented project work at multiple venues:
- GIS in the Rockies Conference - GIS data organization and sustainability data accessibility
- NAIRR Pilot Inaugural Annual Meeting - BiliCore framework demonstration
- 14th Annual Undergraduate Research Conference at MSU Denver - AI evaluation and LLM comparison frameworks
Media Coverage
The Sustainability Hub has been featured in MSU Denver’s RED Magazine:
“Questions about the environment? Bili may have answers” (January 2026)
Coverage of the Hub’s development and Bili’s capabilities, highlighting student contributions to the project.
Current Focus
The project is currently focused on:
- Launching a working prototype of Bili for general sustainability Q&A
- Expanding community engagement in rural Colorado regions
- Refining BiliCore with broader model comparisons
- Developing backend data infrastructure with ingestion pipelines
- Conducting user testing and co-design sessions
- Launching Sustainability Spotlights - focused features on specific topics, beginning with Colorado water scarcity