Image: The University of Georgia’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI) recently hosted its final campus-wide event of the academic year: AI Research Day. The student-focused afternoon fostered vital connections between students, faculty, and industry leaders through engaging presentations, a career-focused panel, and a student research showcase. Attendees gained valuable insights from keynote presentations delivered by leading industry experts, including Brad Lawrence (IT Site Leader, Johnson & Johnson), Akul Dewan (AI Product Architect, Akamai), and Rex VanHorn and Philipp Roth-Kleyer (AI Solution Architects, Boehringer Ingelheim), along with AI ethicist Savneet Singh (Emory University). Their talks addressed topics such as AI ethics, responsible scaling, cybersecurity, and enterprise integration. The student focus carried over into a highly interactive career panel, "From Posters to Paychecks: Navigating the AI Job Market." Panelists Singh, Lawrence, Dewan, and VanHorn responded to audience questions on real-world challenges, including workforce anxiety, training non-specialists on the proper use of LLMs, and ensure safety and accountability when deploying physical AI systems such as mobile robots. Panelists also provided frameworks for identifying true AI use cases and highlighted the foundational skills fresh graduates need to secure product-based roles in a rapidly shifting job market. The centerpiece of the afternoon was the industry-judged student poster session. Featuring over 35 projects evaluated directly by our visiting industry professionals, the floor was buzzing with discussions highlighting exceptional work across IAI's five themes of convergence. Poster awards Congratulations to our AI Research Day 2026 Poster Award Winners for their outstanding contributions to the field: Lingze Zeng (#10) – When Decentralized Training Outperforms Centralized: Insights from Competitive Sparse-Reward MARL Suqiang Ma (#37) – Automated Sickling Dynamics Analysis Using an Agentic Pipeline for Real-Time Cell Progression Monitoring in Sickle Cell Disease Daniel Redder (#20) – Are we there yet!? Optimality and Uncertainty in Open Multi-Agent Systems Zaki Indra Sukma (#15) – CORAL: Covariance-Guided Resource Adaptive Learning for Efficient Edge Inference Shuborno Anwar (#17) – Output-Level Biases in LLM Regional Storytelling: Lexical Patterns across Africa, Western Asia, and South Asia Thank you to all the speakers, panelists, faculty, and students who contributed to the success of AI Research Day and continue to drive the future of AI research at UGA!
