AI is rapidly evolving from a supporting technology into a transformative force in higher education, enabling universities to rethink teaching, learning, assessment, and academic support through continuously available, personalized, and pedagogically guided intelligent assistance at unprecedented scale. The responsible use of AI has significant potential to provide continuous, scalable, and personalized educational assistance, as demonstrated by Harvard’s course-specific AI tools that use pedagogical guardrails, retrieval-augmented generation, and human-in-the-loop approaches to guide students toward solutions while extending educators’ reach. This guard-railed approach may offer a more constructive alternative to simply forbidding AI, potentially reducing academically dishonest use of unrestricted AI tools available online. Furthermore, recent advances in multimodal AI further enhance this potential through educational agents that integrate text, audio, and video to support diverse learning styles and needs, enabling more personalized, dynamic, and interactive learning experiences.
The keynote will explore the convergence of Generative AI, multimodal AI, RAG, intelligent tutoring, AI agents, adaptive learning, learning analytics, and immersive environments to augment educators and enable personalized learning, real-time feedback, and intelligent collaboration, while emphasizing ethical integrity, fairness, human-in-the-loop decision-making, institutional readiness, and responsible governance.

III-V semiconductor materials and devices are the preferred solution for many energy and photonic applications due to their wide coverage of direct bandgaps, high electron mobility, high thermal stability, and many other exceptional properties. However, many elements or dopants used in III-V materials can be highly toxic, limited in quantity, or sourced from specific regions with associated geopolitical issues. This paper discusses the Development of Rare Earth Alternative Materials (DREAM) and the potential of ZnO, GeO2, and related materials to transform the semiconductor industry as non-toxic, earth-abundant wide-bandgap materials. For example, the primary hindrance to the broad-based adoption of ZnO has been reliably p-doping these materials to produce a p-n junction. However, this presentation will show that, despite this limitation, ZnO, GeO2, and related materials have been used in numerous applications, before identifying some future areas of interest. These applications and areas of interest include photonics, energy harvesting, spintronics, thermoelectrics, electronics, quantum computing, construction, and nuclear applications.