In 1881, on the first night of classes at Newark Technical School, the predecessor to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 88 students walked through a snowstorm into a three-story building on West Park Street. The building was lit with 26 light bulbs, using electricity provided free of charge by Edward Weston, one of the university’s founders and the inventor of the first portable device that could accurately measure electrical current.
Weston realized what he was looking at. He believed that when technology is poised to reshape industry and daily life, an organization’s duty is to prepare people for the world it will create. Almost 150 years later, NIT is reawakening that instinct.
From high-profile keynotes to autonomous robots, instant content creation, and campus-wide displays of student-built technology, NIT’s AI Exploration Day suspends regular classes for the day and invites the entire community to explore artificial intelligence for the day. Explore what artificial intelligence demands, what it enables, and what it means for the future of work, education and society.
“Three years ago, AI could barely write code that worked,” said Chancellor John Peresko, who opened the day with remarks that underscored the problem. “Today, 30% of code at Microsoft and Google is written by AI. The world our students are entering is not the world we were preparing them for even three years ago.”
Peresko positioned this day not as a day to celebrate AI, but as a necessary confrontation with it. He argued that artificial intelligence is fundamentally different from the technologies that NIT has adapted to in the past, namely electricity and computers, because it does more than simply amplify human work. Run it. “It writes, it reasons, it solves problems, it generates ideas,” he said. “Jobs similar to the jobs we teach people will emerge.” The questions raised about learning, teaching, research, careers, and organizational responsibilities are exactly what the day was about, he told the audience.
Dave Cole, New Jersey’s Chief Innovation Officer, grounded the day’s conversation in the real-world results of the technologies being discussed. Cole pointed to government services such as unemployment benefits, access to health insurance, and food assistance as areas where AI could either accelerate relief or make hardship worse, depending on the choices of those building and deploying it.
“Sometimes it feels like these big technology movements are happening to us,” he told the audience. “But it should happen to us, too.” He concluded with a plea to think about artificial intelligence not only as an economics issue but also as a values issue, and to take both perspectives into every decision.
practice
The morning began with a keynote address by Dr. Ethan Mollick. Mollick is the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Professor, associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, co-director of the Wharton School’s Generative AI Lab, author of the New York Times bestseller “Co-Intelligence,” and one of TIME Magazine’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence. His presence set an unmistakable intellectual record for everything that followed.
Mollick’s talk and demonstration set the tone for a packed day that included dozens of faculty breakout sessions, a day-long living lab experience, and more than 100 student-led presentations on how they are integrating AI into education and research.
Campus-wide: Living Lab
Parallel experiences unfolded across campus from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., as classrooms and conference rooms filled with sessions. At Living Labs (12 interactive stations spread across the Guttenberg Information Technology Center, Campus Center, and Center King Building), attendees were invited to stop by, try things out, and engage directly with working AI.
The robot performed navigation in real time. The drone has demonstrated autonomous flight. Motion capture technology tracked human movements on stage. The AI-powered experience allowed visitors to interact with red wolves, an endangered species, as part of a wildlife conservation demonstration. The stations were hosted by NJIT labs, student organizations, and industry partners including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Cisco.
Breakout Session: All Areas
The day then branched into two concurrent breakout sessions. Presentations, workshops, and discussions took place across seven thematic tracks: AI research and discovery, industry transformation, sustainability and energy, AI literacy, ethics and equity, cross-sector collaboration, and the future of human identity in an AI-shaped world.
Featuring faculty from across NJIT’s colleges, along with staff from Libraries, Career Development, Institutional Effectiveness, Communications and Marketing, and Learning Development Initiatives, the breakout sessions provided the most visible demonstration of how broadly AI is taking root across the university.
Sessions ranged from live demonstrations of intelligent cyber-physical systems and AI-powered material discovery to hands-on art workshops that challenged participants to think about what humans should protect in the age of automation. The research team has announced PaperBasket, a live pre-screening tool designed to rescue academic peer review from an unsustainable cycle of AI-generated papers. NJIT prevention specialists led a candid session on deepfakes, digital-based sexual abuse, and the ethics of consent.
Biomedical engineering professor Xin Di, who presented “AI for Neural Precision: Advances in Brain Mapping, Connectivity, Imaging Infrastructure, and Scientific Rigor,” said he wants the community to understand that AI is an incredible key to solving the mysteries of the brain.
“But with great power comes great responsibility.” AI is so powerful that it must be treated more rigorously than ever before. We want to use AI to push the boundaries of neuroscience, but we need to make sure we are grounded in solid scientific evidence. ”
Difficult questions were inevitable during the session. A track dedicated to ethics and equity brought presenters to confront issues such as AI-driven hiring bias, algorithmic fairness in large-scale language models, and the erosion of academic integrity.
Student Showcase: Stepping into the future of AI
More than 100 NJIT students, including graduate and undergraduate students, took over the auxiliary court in the Bloom Wellness and Event Center for the Student Showcase. During the digital poster session, each team gave a light talk to anyone who stopped by their station.
The project was as far-reaching as the breakout tracks that preceded it. A team has developed AI-powered assistive glasses for visually impaired users. Another company has developed a real-time tinnitus noise cancellation system. Business students created an AI-powered sustainable fashion platform. Graduate students presented the NeuroNav AI robotic arm. One student challenged the privacy implications of “data slop,” a degraded information environment created by large amounts of AI-generated content.
Digital design students Giovanni Crocco and Daria Kozlenko proposed an application of AI called “Step into the Spotlight: Combining Motion Capture and Theater.” They demonstrated how the NJIT Theater and Digital Design programs are working together to incorporate real-time motion capture technology into stage design, choreography, and more. Participants stepped into motion capture and watched themselves perform.
“When people see their movements mimicked in a digital setting, they seem to be overjoyed and very happy just to see the technology,” Crocco said. “So the biggest thing we’ve been talking about is whether the audience for this production will enjoy the characters and the implications of the AI that are reflected in the theatrical production. And after today, we believe this production will be very well received.”
KET-A Williams ’26, a McNair Scholar majoring in cyberpsychology, presented research on how underground fungal networks known as mycelium, which distribute nutrients and chemical signals without central control, could inspire new models for AI design.
“What struck me most was their willingness to coexist. They were trying to maintain not just themselves, but the entire ecosystem through relational exchanges,” she said. “It made me think more broadly about intelligence,” said Williams, who is interested in AI systems that could function as adaptive, decentralized networks that redistribute computational loads, respond to environmental constraints, and minimize the use of harvested energy. She calls this approach “regenerative AI,” which takes advantage of biological systems that maintain balance rather than maximize output.
This showcase made it clear that NJIT students are not passive observers of the AI era. They are among the most active, critical and creative participants.
Closing Panel: “Stop putting chatbots in your terrible processes”
Moderated by David Bader, distinguished professor and director of NJIT’s Data Science Institute and a nationally recognized leader in high-performance computing, “AI in Industry and Society” brought together representatives from Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Dell, Google, and NVIDIA to discuss how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way organizations work, compete, and make decisions. The panel consisted of:
- mary strainAI and Machine Learning Strategy Leader, Amazon, AWS
- Lu HanxingAI Solutions Engineer, Cisco
- Brian AnzalduaPrincipal and Field CTO, AI Advisory Solutions, Dell
- Cynthia BennettResearcher, Google
- Daniel VargasSystem Safety Engineer, NVIDIA
Brian Anzaldua cited a McKinsey study that found that 95% of generative AI projects in enterprises fail to deliver ultimate value. This isn’t because the technology doesn’t work, it’s because organizations are deploying technology against broken processes rather than rethinking the entire process. Mary Strain crystallized the problem when she said, “Stop putting chatbots in horrible processes.” It was a bitter smile. No one objected.
Ms. Strain expanded on this point with distinction drawing on her work in higher education institutions across the country. The difference between personal productivity tools and true corporate transformation. She argued that the former has so far dominated AI investment. There is real value in the latter, and the market is still starting to change. Cisco’s Hangxin Lu echoed similar sentiments from a security perspective, noting that customers who have been active in AI adoption are now considering governance and risk.
On safety, the committee found broad consensus on subtle points, including transparency about when AI is used, human oversight of its output, and guardrails to protect without over-correcting. Cynthia Bennett pointed out that poorly designed safety guardrails can inadvertently exclude users with disabilities who rely on AI to access information. A reminder that responsible AI design requires more than limits.
Daniel Vargas, a systems safety engineer who researches self-driving vehicle safety at NVIDIA, was a notable guest on the panel. Vargas, a 2015 NJIT graduate and first-generation college graduate born in Morristown, N.J., to Guatemalan immigrant parents, came to NJIT as a student and retired as an engineer. He then worked at Boeing, L3Harris, and BAE Systems before joining NVIDIA in 2022. He returned to campus not only as an industry representative but also as the founder of the Vargas Family’s “Highlander Promise” scholarship, which supports students pursuing STEM degrees at NIT with free education.
“You come to college to learn how to learn. If you know those concepts and how to solve problems, you can work in anything,” Vargas said. “For example, I have a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. I have never worked as an electrical engineer in my career.”
His arc from the Newark campus to the frontier of autonomous systems and back again captured the essence of the day itself.
What the day suggested
AI Exploration Day was ostensibly a single event. Below that was a statement from the organization. The idea was that NJIT takes artificial intelligence seriously enough to involve the entire community (all universities, disciplines, and professional levels) in the same conversation at the same time.
Efforts have already begun to determine what comes next between Living Lab Stations, breakout sessions, student presenters, five of the world’s most influential technology companies, and a Newark, New Jersey, university that has been preparing students for a technological future for more than 140 years.
