Institutional Readiness in the Age of AI
More than 200 guests registered to attend the two Distinguished Speaker Series events NNCI hosted this month
AI is rapidly reshaping how we teach, learn, and conduct research. Advances in AI and modern cyberinfrastructure are transforming sectors across scientific and technological domains, including higher education.
More than 200 researchers, students, and practitioners registered to attend two recent events exploring these themes, hosted by the Northwestern Network for Collaborative Intelligence (NNCI).
Through the Distinguished Speaker Series, NNCI sparks interdisciplinary and cross-functional dialogue and illuminates emerging ideas around responsible and high-impact research and education in data science and AI.
V.S. Subrahmanian
“AI will revolutionize how universities operate in the coming decades. NNCI faculty, staff, and students are leading efforts to responsibly shape this revolution,” said V.S. Subrahmanian, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern Engineering, faculty fellow at the Northwestern Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and director of the Northwestern Security and AI Lab.
AI and modern cyberinfrastructure
For NNCI’s Distinguished Panel event on April 7, the panel explored how AI powered approaches are reshaping discovery and innovation, and fostering the shared environments, data frameworks, and cross disciplinary partnerships needed to solve complex scientific and societal challenges. The panel included NNCI founding codirector Abel Kho, professor of medicine and preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine; Sean Mooney, director of the US National Institutes of Health Center for Information Technology; Joe Paris, associate vice president of Northwestern University IT Services and Support; and moderator Kristi Holmes, director of the Galter Health Sciences Library and Learning Center at Feinberg.
Emphasizing the essential role of interdisciplinary collaboration and partnerships, the panel stressed the need to actively engage students, faculty, and staff in critical technical and cultural questions around human oversight, governance, and data sharing risks.
“Student engagement is becoming indispensable,” Kho said. “Amazing ideas are coming from a groundswell of student innovators.”
Highlighting persistent structural challenges, the group discussed how interoperability and standardization remain major barriers to AI enabled research, particularly in biomedical domains where siloed systems complicate data access and integration. At the same time, compute, storage, and specialized hardware demands are accelerating sharply, prompting institutions to rethink their infrastructure strategies and long term investments. Looking ahead, the speakers encouraged a shift away from replicating human processes toward leveraging AI for tasks uniquely suited to computation, such as synthetic data generation, digital twins, and simulation based prediction.
AI and the future of education
On April 14, NNCI welcomed a panel of pioneering educators to explore how AI is transforming the higher education landscape—from the classroom to the research lab. Karen Smilowitz, Northwestern’s Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, moderated the discussion with NNCI’s Education Pillar leads—Jeremy Gilbert, Knight Professor in Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing; and Sara Owsley Sood, Chookaszian Family Teaching Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education in Computer Science at Northwestern Engineering.
Underscoring a big-picture imperative as AI forces a fundamental reexamination of approach and education goals, the panelists grounded the discussion with the foundational question “what do we want our students to know, be able to do, and be able to communicate to the world?"
The conversation highlighted the essential, irreplaceable human dimensions of learning. Sood reflected on the trend of students relying more on AI than on meeting with faculty and peers during office hours.
"As teachers, we motivate people,” Sood said. “We connect with the students and mentor them. And that mentorship is something that you lose when you're talking to a bot."