The Institute for AI (IAI) is pleased to launch its second interdisciplinary seed grant program for this fiscal year. Our aim is to seed multi-disciplinary teams of IAI faculty with resources so that they can execute inter-disciplinary research projects that can lead to large extramural research grants.

For more information on the Research Seed Grant Program, please click here.

Seed Grant proposals are due by Saturday, November 15th, 2025 at 11:59pm EST. Please submit your Proposals to UGA's InfoReady system.

The University of Georgia’s annual Ethics Week Lecture will be delivered by Arun Rai, a distinguished scholar who has studied digital innovations in organizations and communities for more than 35 years.

Rai's work focuses on responsible artificial intelligence usage for the future of work, while exploring the intersection between research, education and policy. He currently serves as a Regents’ Professor and the Howard S. Starks Distinguished Chair in the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, and he co-founded and directs the Robinson College’s Center for Digital Innovation.

The event is free and open to the public, but registration is encouraged.

For more details, click here.

The IAI Spotlight on New Faculty was a tremendous success.  Over 50 faculty, students, and staff came to participate in the three hour event.  We heard from leaders in the AI industry at Insight Enterprises and NVIDIA, learned about the exciting research that our new fellows are working on, and finally broke out into small gro

This event celebrates 40 years of achievements in Artificial Intelligence at UGA with research highlights, open discussions and faculty mixers.

This event included Keynote speeches from Aaron DeFazio of Meta, Bo Lane of Lockchain.ai, and David Millard of Azalea Robotics, as well as a panel discussion on Sustainability, Human and Environmental Costs in the Quest for AGI, and a poster session.

The AI Research Spotlight event focused on our seed grant awardees. Event highlights include research talks by Seed Grant awardees, and interactive breakout sessions.

Institute for AI is co-organizing a symposium with College of Agriculture departments to start a conversation about topics of AI integration in the field of precision livestock farming (PLF). Sessions include discussion panels, talks by top PLF scientists, and more.

Moderator: Tapan Kamdar, Sr. Director, Product Management, Search & AI
Panelist: Professor Prashant Doshi and Dr. Kimberly Van Orman
Duration: 30 minutes

Session Goal

Explore the role of ethics in AI development, bridging academic insights and industry practice. Provide developers and product leaders with practical, thoughtful perspectives on why ethics matter.

AGENDA

• 2:00pm Welcome 

  Fellows & students, speakers networking over refreshments

   

• 2:25pm Keynote

  

  AI in Practice, Steven Strickland, Hayden Holland, and John McSwain

Steven is a Senior Principal at Insight, a Fortune 500 solutions integrator, where he oversees market development and solution sales for 5G network infrastructure. In this role, he engages with enterprise and public sector clients to design, deploy, and manage networks that provide the high-speed, low-latency connectivity needed for AI, IoT, edge computing, and other operational use cases. Steven holds a BBA from Oglethorpe University, an MS in Management from the Georgia Technology, and a Master in Law from the University of Georgia. He is also a certified PMP. 

Hayden is a Cloud security & AI governance manager at SADA, an Insight Company, Hayden leads the security engineering team and leverages a decade of experience across the Cloud landscape. He specializes in partnering with clients to architect robust security solutions and bolster guardrails for AI adoption. Hayden holds a BS & MS in Information Systems from the University of Florida and maintains several GCP engineering certifications.

John is a technologist, educator, and entrepreneur with six degrees (an MBA and MS in CS from Georgia Tech, MS in Entrepreneurship from UF, MS in HCI from Iowa State, and M.Ed. in Educational Practice & Innovation from South Carolina). Since 2020, he has been at NVIDIA, where he currently serves as a Senior Solutions Architect working with Dell OEM and channel partners to demonstrate and design generative AI solutions—including NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NIMs, AI Workbench, Isaac Sim for autonomous mobile robots, and Morpheus—alongside GPU-accelerated platforms like Brev and Run:ai. Previously at NVIDIA, he worked as an engineer with NVIDIA Omniverse. John has also led innovation at Accenture, contributed to cloud solutions at AWS, and launched ventures across multiple industries, while teaching business programming and professional education at GT.

• 3:20pm Spotlight on New Fellows 

  10 min talks each

  • Hee Yun Lee, Thomas P. Holland Distinguished Professor, School of Social Work
  • Akshat Lakhiwal, Assistant Professor of MIS, Terry College of Business
  • Zhen Xiang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Franklin College of Arts & Sciences
  • Tao Liu, Assistant Professor of Precision Forestry, Warnell School of Forestry
  • Jie Lu, Assistant Professor of Workforce Ed. & Instruction Tech., Early College of Education

• 4:15pm Breakouts

  Working groups on convergence themes:

  • AI in Education
  • Ethics of AI
  • AI & Future of Health and Work
  • AI for 3F (Farm, Food, Forest)
  • AI for Cyber & Societal Security

   

• 5:00pm Report out