Blog on AiR HUB

Piyush Puranik Awarded iRDA Seed Grant to Stress-Test AI Safety in Gambling

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:37:19 -0700

We’re pleased to share that Piyush Puranik, Postdoctoral Fellow at UNLV International Gaming Institute and Lead Data Scientist for AiR Hub, has been awarded a 2026 AI & Big Data iRDA Seed Grant for his project Stress-Testing LLM Resilience in Gambling Ecosystems. Congratulations, Piyush!

The grant will fund a novel line of research examining how frontier large language models behave when deployed in gambling contexts – and, critically, where they break down. As AI agents become increasingly embedded in customer-facing gambling operations, from chatbots to recommendation systems, the industry lacks rigorous evidence on how these models handle the high-stakes ethical and regulatory pressures unique to gaming.

The AI Paradox: Why We Can't Measure Progress in Protecting Vulnerable Gamblers

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Over the past 20 years Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an important cornerstone of Responsible Gambling (RG) efforts, with automated systems now central to detecting players at risk of harm. Millions of people globally participate in gambling, and AI has become a key technology operators use to identify problematic behaviour through behavioural markers to trigger early interventions.

This technology is having an important impact on the industry and has increasingly become embedded in gambling regulations globally, yet the field faces a profound and worrying challenge: the effectiveness of these AI systems is fundamentally unmeasured.

Building up the tech infrastructure at AiR HUB

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:00:00 +0000

As the lead data scientist at AiR HUB, a significant part of my job is just managing data. We get a lot of sensitive info from our industry partners, and we definitely can’t just slap that onto the public web.

This brings up a big question: where do we put it all? Cloud services are great, but ideally, we want to keep everything on-premises right here at the International Gaming Institute. The catch is that local servers usually can’t match the uptime guarantees that the big cloud giants promise.

NeurIPS 2025: A Week of AI Innovation and What It Means for the Gambling Industry

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:00:00 +0000

This past week, I attended NeurIPS 2025 (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) in San Diego. For those unfamiliar, NeurIPS is the premier annual event on the artificial intelligence and machine learning calendar. It’s a gathering of both the academic and industrial research communities that presents the latest innovations and, more importantly, sets the research agenda for years to come.

This was my first NeurIPS and I was astounded by the sheer amount of content. Tutorials, workshops, keynotes, oral presentations, and posters… wow, the poster sessions! There were two 3-hour poster sessions across three days of the conference in a room that would rival the size of the G2E or ICE exhibit halls. See the pic below—there must have been at least 1,000 posters in each session!

Unpacking ICE’s New AI Industry Challenge

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 10:35:08 -0800

A new type of industry challenge

For the first time in January 2026, ICE will host an innovators challenge with a specific focus on AI and responsible gambling. I’ll be judging the top five shortlisted entries alongside Daniel Stillwell, Data and AI Leader: Cloud Architecture at Microsoft, and Alon Ben David, CTO of Super Group, at the finale on 20 January.

The Design Thinking Behind the AiR Hub Logo

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

At AiR Hub, we’re working at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, gambling, innovation, regulation, and research. These are domains that don’t always speak the same visual language. So from the start, we knew our logo had to reflect this complexity, and we didn’t want to resort to gambling clichés or the typical “techy look.” We needed the logo to convey intelligence, credibility, and clarity, but it also had to be something that could live comfortably in both academic settings and digital spaces.

Can Chatbots Keep Gamblers Safe?

Tue, 27 May 2025 14:05:46 -0700

Chatbots Are Already Giving Gambling Advice

Hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT-style tools every week. Inevitably, many likely ask about gambling - everything from “What’s a good roulette strategy?” to “How do I stop chasing my losses?”

Yet today’s large language models (LLMs) were not trained with gambling conversations in mind. In a domain where misguided advice can have serious negative consequences - including financial loss, psychological distress, or addiction - even small errors or mixed messages carry significant risk.

Welcome to AiR Hub

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

We’re thrilled to announce the official launch of the AI Research Hub (AiR Hub) here at UNLV International Gaming Institute. The Hub is an interdisciplinary initiative exploring the impact, risks, and opportunities of AI in the gambling industry.

Our mission is simple: to advance AI research to support ethical innovation and inform responsible governance across the gambling sector.

What We’re Working On

We’re already hard at work on several major initiatives: