AI Exploration Day at NJIT: A University-Wide Reckoning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

On the first night of classes at the Newark Technical School in 1881 — the institution that would become New Jersey Institute of Technology — 88 students walked through a snowstorm into a three-story building on West Park Street. The building was lit by 26 light bulbs, powered by electricity furnished for free by Edward Weston, one of the university’s founders and the inventor of the first portable instruments capable of accurately measuring electrical current.

Weston understood what he was looking at. He believed that when a technology arrives poised to reshape industry and daily life, the obligation of an institution is to prepare people for the world it creates. Nearly 150 years later, NJIT is invoking that instinct again.

From a marquee keynote to a campus-wide exhibition of autonomous robots, instantaneous content creation and student-built technologies, NJIT’s AI Exploration Day put normal classes on hold for the day to invite the entire community for a full-day exploration of artificial intelligence: what it demands, what it enables and what it means for the future of work, education and society.

“Three years ago, AI could barely write a working piece of code,” said Provost John Pelesko who opened the day with remarks that set the stakes plainly. “Today, 30% of the code at Microsoft and Google is written by AI … The world our students are entering is not the one we were preparing them for even three years ago.”

Pelesko framed the day not as a celebration of AI but as a necessary confrontation with it. Artificial intelligence, he argued, is categorically different from the technologies NJIT has adapted to before — electricity, the computer — because it does not merely amplify human work. It performs it. “It writes, it reasons, it solves problems, it generates ideas,” he said. “It produces work that looks like the work we teach people to do.” The questions that raises about learning, teaching, research, career and institutional responsibility were, he told the audience, exactly what the day was for.

Dave Cole, New Jersey’s State Chief Innovation Officer, grounded the day’s conversations in the lived consequences of the technology under discussion. Cole pointed to government services — unemployment benefits, health insurance access, food assistance — as domains where AI could either accelerate relief or compound hardship, depending on the choices made by the people building and deploying it.

“It can feel sometimes like a large technology movement like this happens to us,” he told the audience. “But it should happen with us.” He closed with a charge: think of artificial intelligence not only as an economic problem, but as a values problem — and bring both lenses to every decision.

Hands On

The morning opened with a keynote from Dr. Ethan Mollick. Mollick is the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar, associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, co-director of the Generative AI Labs at Wharton, 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 register for everything that followed.

Mollick’s talk and demonstrations set the tone for what would be a packed day featuring dozens of breakout sessions from faculty and staff, day-long Living Lab experiences and over 100 student-led presentations on how they are synthesizing AI with their education and research.

Across Campus: The Living Lab

While sessions filled classrooms and conference rooms, a parallel experience unfolded across campus from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Living Lab — 12 interactive stations spread across the Guttenberg Information Technologies Center, the Campus Center, and the Center King Building — invited attendees to stop in, try things and engage directly with AI in action.

Robots navigated in real time. Drones demonstrated autonomous flight. Motion capture technology tracked human movement on a stage. An AI-powered experience allowed visitors to hold a conversation with a red wolf — a species on the brink of extinction — as part of a wildlife conservation demonstration. Stations were hosted by NJIT research labs, student organizations, and industry partners including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Cisco.

Breakout Sessions: The Full Spectrum

The day then branched into two rounds of concurrent breakout sessions — presentations, workshops and discussions 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.

Faculty from every college at NJIT participated — alongside staff from the Library, Career Development, Institutional Effectiveness, Communications and Marketing, and the Learning and Development Initiative — making the breakout sessions among the most visible demonstrations of how broadly AI has taken root across the university.

Sessions ranged from live demonstrations of intelligent cyber-physical systems and AI-enabled materials discovery, to a hands-on art workshop inviting participants to reflect on what humans should keep for themselves in an age of automation. A research team presented PaperBasket, a live pre-screening tool designed to rescue academic peer review from an unsustainable cycle of AI-generated papers. NJIT’s own Prevention Specialist led a frank session on deepfakes, digital-based sexual abuse and the ethics of consent.

Biomedical engineering professor Xin Di, who presented “AI for Neural Precision: Advancing Brain Mapping, Connectivity, Imaging Foundations, and Scientific Rigor,” said he wants the community to see that AI is an incredible key for unlocking the mysteries of the brain.

“But ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’ Because AI is so powerful, we must be more rigorous than ever. We want to use AI to push the boundaries of neuroscience, but we have to make sure our feet are still planted firmly on solid scientific ground."

The sessions did not avoid hard questions. Tracks devoted to ethics and equity drew presenters confronting AI hiring bias, algorithmic fairness in large language models and the erosion of academic integrity.

Student Showcase: Step Into the AI Future

More than 100 NJIT students, both graduate and undergraduate, took over the Bloom Wellness and Events Center auxiliary courts for the Student Showcase, a digital poster session in which each team delivered lightning talks to anyone who stopped by their station.

The projects were as wide-ranging as the breakout tracks that preceded them. One team built AI-powered assistive glasses for users with visual impairments. Another developed a real-time tinnitus noise cancellation system. Management students created an AI-driven sustainable fashion platform. A graduate student presented a NeuroNav AI Robotic Arm. One student challenged the privacy implications of “data slop” — the degraded informational environment created by mass AI-generated content.

Digital design students Giovanni Crocco and Daria Kozlenko offered their application of AI with “Step Into the Spotlight: Motion Capture Meets the Theater.” They demonstrated how the NJIT theatre and digital design programs are teaming up to incorporate real-time motion capture technology into the scenic design, choreography and more. Participants stepped into the motion capture and saw themselves performing.

“Once they see their movements mimicked in a digital setting, people seem to be ecstatic and very happy just to see that technology,” said Crocco. “So the biggest thing that we have been talking about was if the audience for this production is going to enjoy seeing projected characters or the connotation of AI in the theater production, and after today, I believe that it will get a very good and well-received reception.”

KET-A Williams ’26, a McNair Scholar and cyberpsychology major, presented her research on how underground fungal networks known as mycelium — which distribute nutrients and chemical signals without centralized control — might inspire new models for AI design.

“What struck me most was their drive toward symbiosis — sustaining not just themselves, but entire ecosystems through relational exchange,” she said. “That shifted how I began thinking about intelligence more broadly.” Williams said she is interested in such AI systems that may function as adaptive, distributed networks — redistributing computational load, responding to environmental constraints and minimizing extractive energy use. She refers to this approach as “regenerative AI,” drawing on biological systems that sustain balance rather than maximize output.

The showcase made plain that NJIT students are not passive observers of the AI era. They are among its most active, critical and creative participants.

Closing Panel: ‘Stop Putting Chatbots on Terrible Processes’

Moderated by David Bader — distinguished professor and director of the Institute for Data Science at NJIT, 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 comprised:

• Mary Strain, AI and Machine Learning Strategy Leader, Amazon, AWS
• Hangxin Lu, AI Solutions Engineer, Cisco
• Brian Anzaldua, AI Advisory Solutions Principal and Field CTO, Dell
• Cynthia Bennet, Research Scientist, Google
• Daniel Vargas, Systems Safety Engineer, NVIDIA

Brian Anzaldua cited a McKinsey study finding that 95% of enterprise generative AI projects are failing to deliver bottom-line value — not because the technology doesn’t work, but because organizations are deploying it against broken processes rather than reimagining those processes entirely. Mary Strain crystallized the problem: “Stop putting chatbots on terrible processes.” The laughter was wry. Nobody disagreed.

Strain extended the point with a distinction that drew on her work across higher education institutions nationwide. The difference between individual productivity tools and genuine enterprise transformation. The former, she argued, has dominated AI investment so far. The latter is where real value lies and where the market is only beginning to shift. Hangxin Lu of Cisco echoed the sentiment from a security angle, noting that customers who charged into AI adoption are now reckoning with governance and risk.

On safety, the panel found broad if nuanced consensus: transparency about when AI is being used, human oversight of outputs and guardrails that protect without overcorrecting. Cynthia Bennet appended, noting that safety guardrails, if poorly designed, can inadvertently lock out users with disabilities who rely on AI for information access. A reminder that responsible AI design requires more than restriction.

Daniel Vargas, a Systems Safety Engineer at NVIDIA working on autonomous vehicle safety — was a notable guest on the panel. A 2015 NJIT alumnus and first-generation college graduate born in Morristown, New Jersey to Guatemalan immigrant parents, Vargas came to NJIT as a student and left as an engineer. He went on to work at Boeing, L3Harris, and BAE Systems before joining NVIDIA in 2022. He returned to campus not only as an industry representative, but as the founder of the Vargas Family “Highlander Promise” Scholarship, which supports students pursuing STEM degrees at NJIT with free education.

“You come to the university to learn how to learn, and as long as you know that concept and you know how to problem solve, you can work as anything,” Vargas said. “For example, I have a bachelor’s in electrical engineering. I’ve never worked as an electrical engineer in my career.”

His arc — from Newark campus to the frontier of autonomous systems, and back again — captured something essential about the day itself.

What the Day Signaled

AI Exploration Day was, on its surface, a single event. Underneath, it was an institutional statement: that NJIT takes artificial intelligence seriously enough to bring its entire community — every college, discipline and level of expertise — into the same conversation at the same time.

Between the living lab stations, breakout sessions, student presenters, five of the world’s most influential technology companies, and a university in Newark, New Jersey, that has been preparing students for the future of technology for more than 140 years, the work of figuring out what comes next is already underway.

https://news.njit.edu/ai-exploration-day-njit-university-wide-reckoning-age-artificial-intelligence