Services

Text Lab on OnDemand

Text Lab is an interactive, secure framework of advanced Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. It runs directly on the university's High-Performance Computing cluster (UBELIX) via the Open OnDemand platform. Because all models run on university hardware, your sensitive research data never leaves the university network.

Current features include:

  • Audio Transcription: Highly accurate multi-lingual transcription using Whisper, featuring Speaker Diarization and dedicated support for Swiss German.
  • AI Chat: A private AI assistant that allows you to upload and "chat" directly with your own documents (PDFs, text) using Ollama and open-source models.
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Extract text, complex tables, and layouts from images and PDFs using a choice of state-of-the-art vision models (including GLM-OCR, olmOCR, PaddleOCR, and EasyOCR).
  • AI Data Visualiser: Upload your tabular data and instruct an AI agent to automatically write Python code and generate interactive plots.
  • Knowledge Graph Generator: Process collections of scientific papers to automatically extract metadata, citations, and research topics, visualizing them as an interactive network graph.

Documentation & User's guide: For detailed instructions, capabilities, and best practices, please visit the User guide: https://text-lab.dsl.unibe.ch/

How to Access: To launch the application, log in to OnDemand at https://ondemand.hpc.unibe.ch/ (requires your Campus Account to be activated on UBELIX), navigate to the Data Science Lab Services dropdown in the menu at the top, and select Text Lab.

Whisper

DSL provides a container and script to use OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model on the Ubelix HPC Cluster. Documentation below:

Documentation (PDF, 1.1 MB)

Grid Certificates

DSL operates Swiss National Authority for eScience Grid Certificates as a service.

At present, we can only provide IGTF-compliant grid host certificates without public browser trust to Swiss academic and research organizations.
Public-trust certificates or user grid certificates are not available, but contact us with your use case if you need them.

We work with eMudhra as the CA for the certificates.

Host certificates are issued for a single FQDN for a duration of 1 year.
In 2025, the price per certificate is set to 200 CHF, billed on a half-year basis.

Reach out to alexander.kashev@unibe.ch for instructions on requesting a host certificate.
Be prepared to be able to manipulate DNS TXT records to provide domain control validation.