Falling into AI 2026

Falling into AI is One KU's premier three-day AI summit exploring the opportunities, challenges, and future impact of artificial intelligence across higher education, healthcare, research, and the workforce.

This summit brings together educators, students, researchers, healthcare professionals, community partners, and industry leaders from across the KU campus and the KU Medical Center to discuss how AI is transforming education, research, healthcare, and the future of work.

The summit opens on Tuesday, September 22, at the KU campus in Lawrence with keynote presentations from Zac Chase (Google) and Mary Strain (Amazon Web Services), followed by a panel discussion and concurrent breakout sessions organized into research, education, and student-focused tracks. The afternoon concludes with open lab tours and showcases of student organizations and research centers, including FLITE, CIDDL, and Project RAISE.

Due to limited seating, attendees must register for the Open Lab Tours and the specific sessions they plan to attend on Tuesday, September 22. Attendees will be asked to select their preferred tours at checkout. No session registration is required for Thursday, September 24. Attendees are welcome to attend the One KU AI Showcase activities throughout the day.

On Wednesday, September 23, the summit moves to the KU Medical Center to explore the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare, clinical innovation, and research. Through faculty talks, student research showcases, presentations highlighting AI initiatives across KU, interactive labs, and community partner discussions, attendees will learn how AI is influencing healthcare and medical research across the KU community. This day is invite-only with KUMC IDs required.

P4 parking for Wed Sept 23rd: Address: P4 - Bluff Garage - 3700 Rainbow Blvd, KC, KS

If you are not a KUMC staff member or employee, please press the call button at the parking garage (P4) entrance and state the event name, "Falling into AI." You will be granted access to the parking garage.

From the garage, the Hemingway Building is a short walk away. Once inside the Hemingway Building, the Beller Conference Center is located on the second floor and can be reached via the central staircase or the elevator.

Thursday, September 24, brings together the Lawrence and KUMC campuses for the One KU AI Showcase in Lawrence, featuring lightning talks with industry leaders, vendor and community showcases, networking opportunities, and interractive presentations highlighting collaborative research and innovation happening across KU and KUMC. Lightning Talks will be located in the Woodruff Auditorium and the English Room. Industry and community partners will have opportunities to connect directly with faculty, researchers, students, and healthcare professionals from across the university.

Throughout the week, attendees will have opportunities to hear from industry leaders, participate in breakout sessions, engage with researchers, visit vendor and community showcases, connect with employers and industry partners, and explore both the opportunities and challenges associated with the adoption of AI. Whether you're excited about AI, curious to learn more, or skeptical about what its impact means for you and your profession, Falling into AI offers a space to learn, ask questions, and connect with others.

Info: Zac Chase is the Global Lead for Scaled Programming at Google for Education, who previously led development of the U.S. National Education Technology Plan at the Department of Education.

Info: Mary Strain leads AI and machine learning strategy for U.S. education at Amazon Web Services and began her career teaching middle school in the Bronx.

Info: Panel with Google, AWS, Dell, and Burns & McDonnell; facilitated by Perry and Maggie Mosher.

Info: Amazon's cloud division and a leading provider of AI and machine-learning infrastructure .

Info: Dr. James Basham, The Center for Innovation, Design, and Digital Learning (CIDDL), focused on technology in educator preparation.

Info: Examine Apple’s integrated approach to artificial intelligence, from the design of Apple Silicon to the AI-powered capabilities that are now built into the platform. Attendees will explore how these technologies apply in a higher education context, with attention to privacy, security, and accessibility. The session will include demonstrations of current tools and use cases, along with practical guidance for developing AI proficiency on Apple devices. This session is open only to KU and KUMC attendees.

Info: KU's financial operations team discusses the opportunities, challenges, and future of AI in finance.

Info: This session examines how the convergence of generative models, agentic systems, and elastic cloud platforms is reshaping the research lifecycle. Looking beyond raw computational hardware, the discussion explores how frontier platforms like Google DeepMind's Co-Scientist and Antigravity function as collaborative intellectual partners—accelerating hypothesis formulation, vetting experimental logic in silico, and dynamically assembling reproducible compute environments. Drawing on practical lessons from enterprise and academic deployments across the country, Christopher Mende outlines the architectural patterns and systemic shifts that allow institutions to cultivate friction-free research ecosystems, empowering scholars across domains to spend their time where it matters most: advancing human knowledge.

Info: Amazon's cloud division and a leading provider of AI and machine-learning infrastructure.

Info: Ready to move beyond simply prompting AI? In this hands-on breakout, discover the right safeguards and boundaries to put Agentic AI to work, then build your own AI agent using ready-to-use instructional templates for teaching, research, and administrative tasks.

Info: From Prediction to Decision: Teaching AI to Read a Patient's Full Medical History - A patient's medical record is a story told across years of visits, tests, and treatments, but most AI systems read only fragments of it and produce risk scores that clinicians cannot confidently act on. I will share how my group builds models that read the full timeline and connect it to established medical knowledge, and why the harder question is not whether a prediction is accurate but whether a care team should change what they do because of it.

Info: Associate director of KU's Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism.

Info: Roy A. Roberts & Regents Distinguished Professor of Economics and director of KU's Institute for Policy & Social Research, and a National Bureau of Economic Research associate.

Info: Leveraging Google AI & Industry Certificates for Student Career Success - As the University of Kansas navigates the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, this in-person session focuses on actionable upskilling and professional development through KU’s participation in the Google AI for Education Accelerator. Designed primarily for faculty and staff while centering student success, the workshop highlights comprehensive training pathways—including hands-on AI fluency modules and industry-recognized Google Career Certificates in high-demand fields like Cybersecurity and Data Analytics. Attendees will explore practical strategies for integrating AI literacy into curricula, elevating administrative capabilities through structured learning, and connecting students across disciplines to no-cost credentials that boost workforce readiness and career mobility.

Info: Dell Technologies on the hardware and infrastructure behind AI.

Info: Visit innovative research, teaching, and learning spaces at Joseph R. Pearson Hall (JRP), the Institute for Information Sciences (I2S), and the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE). The FLITE Simulator will be available throughout the tour period in the FLITE Lab located in the Learning Resource Center (LRC) of JRP.

Info: Featured Labs/Centers - FLITE Center (Flexible Learning through Innovative Technology and Education), KU Center for Digital Learning (KUCD), Center for Innovation, Design & Digital Learning (CIDDL), Center for Research and Evaluation (CRE) / Center for Educational Equity and Leadership (CEEL), Center for Research on Learning (CRL), and Center for Educational Opportunity Programs (COEP). The FLITE Simulator will be available in the FLITE Lab (Learning Resource Center Room 115 – back of Center).

Info: Information sciences, computing, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and advanced technology research.

Info: Teaching innovation, instructional technology, and AI in teaching and learning.

Info: From Bytes to Bench — Best Practices for Life Science Research Agents

Info: Student & Research Lightning Talks;
Posters & Networking

Info: A series of short presentations from industry leaders, community organizations, faculty, and researchers from across KU and KUMC. Lightning talks are structured as 30-minute sessions featuring a 15-minute presentation, a 10-minute Q&A, and a 5-minute transition between speakers. Attendees are welcome to attend individual presentations or stay for the full series. No session registration is required for Thursday, September 24. Attendees are welcome to attend Lightning Talks throughout the day. The full lineup is in the next tab on the agenda.

Info: Amazon Web Services, Google, Dell, KC AI Club (Doug Hohulin & Blake Hodgson), AI Collective (Scott Holsman), SalesForce (Brad Patterson), KU Medical Center technology partners TBD.

Info: Flexible Learning through Innovations in Technology & Education (FLITE), Virtual reality Opportunity to Integrate Social Skills (VOISS), KU Medical Center, Center for Innovation, Design, and Digital Learning (CIDDL), Institute for Information Sciences (I2S), Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), Institute for Policy & Social Research (IPSR).

Info: Amazon's cloud division and a leading provider of AI and machine-learning infrastructure. - Location: Woodruff Auditorium

Info: Generative AI can produce an answer, but universities need AI that understands the institutional context surrounding the question, including data, permissions, processes, and people. This session explores why trusted context is becoming the foundation for moving AI from isolated experimentation to meaningful institutional action, and how emerging approaches like Salesforce and Anthropic's Claudeforce partnership are connecting advanced AI reasoning with governed enterprise data and workflows.

Info: Buying the tools is the easy part. A field report on where AI rollouts go right, where they go wrong, and what separates the two. - Location: Woodruff Auditorium - Email: [email protected] - LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottholsman/

Info: Most enterprise AI programs are still celebrating licenses deployed and employees trained; Jeff Danley, Innovation Development Director at Burns & McDonnell and author of AI-First, shows what comes next: real teams of AI agents doing defined work, with verification built into the architecture and humans validating outputs. Drawing on his own daily operating model and a proven workflow decomposition method, he clarifies what it means to move from AI-adjacent to AI-first. - Location: Woodruff Auditorium - Email: [email protected] - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffdanley/

Info: Using AI and real-time wearable telemetry (IoT Devices via Home Assistant) to answer: Is my loved one safe? Happy? What actions will maximize health over the next minute, hour, day, and year, and how do we coordinate care so nothing is missed? - Location: Woodruff Auditorium - Email:
[email protected] - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doughohulin/

Info: Dell Technologies on the hardware and infrastructure behind AI. - Location: Woodruff Auditorium

Info: Social robots provide a unique opportunity for elementary students to receive one-on-one, personalized instruction that actively engages students, as opposed to a more passive screen-based interaction. This talk presents research on how AI-powered robot tutors can be designed to effectively support children's learning across reading and social-emotional skills. Location: Alderson Room

Info: Use large language models to classify nearly 200,000 science and engineering job ads for signals that employers require or value postdoctoral research experience. We use LLM coding to transform unstructured text into analyzable data, with attention to prompt design, validation against human coders, and the substantive question of whether postdocs are a valuable credential in the private job market or a costly detour for junior scientists. - Location: Alderson Room

Info: Location Woodruff Auditorium

Info: Too many AI tools are built around what technology can do rather than what people need. This lightning talk explores how our research team partners with educators, students, families, and other users to co-design AI innovations that are relevant, effective, and ready for real-world use. Location: Alderson Room

Info: Location: Woodruff

Info: Writing assessment can do more than produce a score; it can provide information that helps students understand what to improve next. This presentation will highlight AI-SCORE as one example of how AI can connect assessment with timely feedback, instructional decision making, and continued writing development. Location: Alderson Room

Info: The presentation and discussion will center on issues impacting integrating AI into teaching, learning, assessment, and research at universities, and some ideas and strategies for moving forward. - Location: Woodruff Auditorium - Email: [email protected]

Info: Location: Alderson Room

Info: Two things stop most AI projects: the context disappears when you close the chat, and the prototype never leaves your laptop. This talk walks through a self-hosted system built to solve both. Every local research session becomes durable, searchable knowledge. That knowledge feeds directly into building and deploying real production applications, and an automated watchdog monitors and repairs them once they are running. The result is a compounding loop where research feeds construction and what breaks in production feeds back into research. No cloud accounts required, and no data leaves the building. - Location: Woodruff Auditorium - Email: [email protected] - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blake-hodgson-39b1198/

Event venue & nearby stays

Kansas Student Union, 1301 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, United States

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