About
What the Lab is, and who it is for
The Lab is Hartford's flagship applied AI initiative — a living community hub connecting residents, businesses, researchers, and practitioners in the emerging AI economy.
What "applied" means here
Bring a task or an idea and work on it here. Applied means you leave having done the thing, on your own accounts and your own files, not having watched a demonstration of it.
Sessions help you try a technique, ask questions and decide where it is useful in your own work.
Who it is for
Hartford residents first: job seekers, small business owners on Park Street or Albany Avenue, nonprofit bookkeepers, high schoolers on a Friday afternoon. Researchers and practitioners use it too, and one of the better things about the room is that those groups end up at the same table.
Learning together
Most of what people need is hard to get from a video: someone to look at the thing on your screen and tell you why it did that. A room means you can ask a half-formed question out loud, watch how somebody else works, and leave with the steps written down.
Where it sits
The Lab is at 10 Constitution Plaza, on the raised deck built between 1961 and 1964 as Hartford's first major redevelopment. Trinity College's Liberal Arts Action Lab has been in the same building since 2018. It puts students and Hartford community partners on the same local problems.
Hartford's history of applied work
Hartford has been an applied city before. The precision manufacturing worked out at the Colt armory in the 1850s turned up at Weed, then at Pope, and eventually built bicycles, automobiles, and enough typewriters to make Hartford the Typewriter Capital of the World. What traveled between those buildings was never the product. It was the technique.