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.
The event invited 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.
From Disruption to Opportunity: The Mollick Keynote
The morning opened with a keynote from Dr. Ethan Mollick — Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar and 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. Mollick opened, characteristically, by letting AI introduce him. The audience laughed. Then they leaned in.
What followed was a clear-eyed survey of where artificial intelligence actually stands — not where the hype places it, and not where skeptics dismiss it, but where the evidence points. He traced the arc from pre-2022 machine learning to today's agentic AI systems that can be assigned tasks, iterate independently and deliver results without continuous human prompting. To illustrate, he showed a fully-produced musical video of himself, generated from a simple prompt in roughly 20 minutes. The threshold for what one person can accomplish — alone, quickly, without specialized training — has moved in ways most institutions have not yet absorbed.
On work, Mollick described AI not as a job destroyer but as something that redistributes the bundle of tasks that belong to humans. On education, he was direct: AI used as a shortcut degrades learning; AI integrated thoughtfully improves it. Baseline knowledge and the ability to keep learning, he argued, matter more now than ever.
His message encouraged, and maybe shocked, the audience — nobody has the full picture yet, everyone is faking it (a bit) and that uncertainty is not a reason for paralysis but for preparation. "The kind of education you're getting here gives you the flexibility you need to solve these problems," Mollick told the audience. "The flexibility to learn at an institution like this one will give you the ability to be flexible. But it's also about shaping the future. It's amazing how much you can do as one person with the kind of work you're doing now."
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.