As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape industries and education, IUP’s third annual AI Summit brought campus and community leaders together to explore its impact in the transformation and modernization of everyday life.
Students, faculty, and staff had the opportunity to deepen their understanding of AI, explore its advantages, and raise questions and concerns surrounding its rapid development and growing role in society.
The summit is hosted by IUP’s Center for Scholarly Communication with support from the IUP Libraries, Research and Innovation and the AI Summit Planning Committee.
Participants attended the summit either virtually via Zoom or in person, choosing from a variety of workshops and speakers that spoke throughout the day.
The presentations were divided into four tracks: AI in Business and Industry, AI Exploration, AI Pedagogy and an expanded AI Research, Tools, and Ethics.
AI in Business and Industry
New to the 2026 summit, the AI in Business and Industry track offered attendees an insight into how industry professionals are using AI to increase decision-making, content production and sharpening business strategies.
Each session within the track featured a guest speaker who specializes in a different professional business field, covering topics such as cybersecurity, project management, organizational intelligence and profitable analytics.
During the session titled “The Intelligent Enterprise: AI’s Impact on Modern Business Disciplines,” presenter Veronica Paz, co-director of IUP’s Center for Teaching Excellence and a professor in the Eberly College of Business, gave audience members a better understanding of how professionals are using AI in accounting, data analytics and IT professional fields.
“We all love cash but it’s not my favorite thing to do, so we use automated bookkeeping and some robotic process automation so that we can record all these transactions,” said Paz.
“This is some of the ways accounting and auditing has become better; AI is not only just a technology support, but it is becoming more of a business partner.”
AI Exploration
Sessions under this track allowed participants to engage directly with AI technology, providing practical guidance focused on utilizing IUP-approved AI tools and exploring additional AI platforms and devices.
Presenters reviewed IUP’s AI guidelines with attendees, demonstrating how to appropriately utilize tools within IUP’s data classification and encryption policies.
To ensure that students are not completely relying on AI to complete their academic courseloads, Andres Rapp, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and co-founder of the AI-generating tool Keenious, showed attendees how to use Keenious to locate appropriate academic journals and articles.
“We want you to be able to engage with the hundreds of articles that are related to what you are working on; they are ranked by perceived relevancy, but you have the full list to engage with yourself and reduce yourself,” said Rapp.
“Those pages and articles can be clicked in on, so if a title is of interest to you, you can read the abstract and if that is of interest to you, then you can access it through your university library.”
Rapp, along with his fellow speakers, advised users to be open about their sources and to be aware of how reliable the information they are using is.
AI Pedagogy
Presenters touched on key topics specifically designed to guide educators on using and mandating AI use for students, such as policy development, student responsibilities, educational impact, critical digital pedagogy and AI instruction methods.
One topic repeatedly covered was how to properly surveil AI use, both from an educator’s and students’ standpoint.
“When reframing assessments, focus on process over outcome, especially when writing; it is helpful for students to show us a draft. If you use AI and you lose track of what AI generated and what was your own thoughts, that can also be a problem,” said Associate Professor of Studies in Education Jacqueline McGinty.
McGinty led a presentation with the help of Doctoral candidate of IUP’s Curriculum and Instruction program, Amour Mmoud, on how attendees can properly decipher the differences between human and AI images and texts.
They concluded that attendees should watch for AI signs that include frequent hyphens, repetitive patterns and overly vivid images.
AI Research, Tools & Ethics
This session explored ethical issues and helped participants gain a better understanding of how AI influences knowledge, creation, human teamwork, burnout and its use in scientific fields.
Senior Director of Responsible AI at Highmark Health Michael Barber spoke to the audience members about his company’s ethical use of AI and the limited risk factors that come with it.
“We use AI from a more fine and ethical perspective in our work to help direct people’s technical questions,” said Barber.
“We use AI for a variety of tasks, mostly looking at our member population, the about members of insurance plans we can look at various stream of claims and all of the clinical information.”
For AI users to remain ethical and safe, presenters like Barber warned individuals to be cautious about possible data breaches and to consider using AI providers powered by renewable energy sources.
The AI Summit was day two out of the five days of IUP’s Research Appreciation Week, which is being celebrated with the Women in STEM Summit, the AI Summit, the Scholars Forum, “From Stack to Synthesis: How the Library Powers Your Literature Review” and the “Introduction to Fulbright.”
