AIxEd Leadership Summit

MAY 8th only

Keynote Talks | Deep Insights

Summit ticket covers entry to [Connect] both days.

Premier full-day gathering of
K-12, Higher-Ed educators and Edtech professionals -
parallel to [Connect] on May 8!

Hear from leaders representing government, industry and academia on the future of learning, workforce transformation, and strategic implications of AI in Education with case studies and best practices.

GET TICKETS!

Don’t miss this premier gathering of education professionals!

Program - May 8

Opening Remarks

Hamit Hamutcu - Founder, AIxEd

Keynote

Dr. Stephen Zrike Jr. - Secretary of Education

Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Fireside Chat

Michael O. Moore - D-Millbury Senator, Massachusetts State Senate

Shauna Conway - Founder, Strategic Growth & Innovation

Panel

Usama Fayyad - Sr. Vice Provost, Northeastern University

Jay Aslam - Chief of Artificial Intelligence, Northeastern University

Daniela Rus - Director. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)

Michael Littman - Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence, Brown University

Fireside Chat

Noe Ortega - Commissioner of Higher Education,

Massachusetts Department of Higher Education

Sabrina Mansur - Director, Mass AI Hub

Lightning Talk

Dan Be Kim - Harvard Graduate School of Education

Muzzy Lane Presents

David McCool

How I learned to stop worrying and love online assessment

Online assessment faces a conundrum. We know that learning requires friction and time on task, but universities and EdTech providers face pressure to create online assessments that are increasingly shorter and less challenging. So the question becomes “Are we measuring learning or progression”? We have been grappling with this issue for over a decade and hopefully learned a few things along the way. I’ll lay out four design principles that we have learned that lead to effective online assessments, both formative and summative.

Fireside Chat

Usama Fayyad - Sr. Vice Provost, Northeastern University

Kjersten Moody - CEO, North America, Elai

Mind the Gap: Rethinking Talent Pipelines for the Agentic AI Era

Keynote

Cansu Canca - Head of Responsible AI, Northeastern University

Founder & Director, AI Ethics Lab

Where is Responsible AI in Higher Education?

AI impacts higher education across every front: teaching, learning, research, administration, and increasingly high-demand industry collaborations. In many respects, universities resemble other large, complex organizations navigating AI integration across their operations. But higher education is also distinct: it not only adopts AI systems, it develops them and trains the very people who will shape their future use. Despite deep in-house expertise, higher ed institutions have been remarkably slow to implement meaningful responsible AI practices. This keynote examines this gap and outlines concrete, actionable components for governance models that better protect, guide, and align institutional AI adoption with the core values and responsibilities of academic institutions.

Harvard University Presents

Xiao-Li Meng - Founding Editor-in-Chief, HDSR

Ruth Steyn - Associate Director, LabXchange

Gaurav Vazirani - Managing Director, LabXchange

Triple Personalization in the Age of AI: When Scale Becomes the Engine of Learning

What if more scale actually enables better personalization? Every educational innovation gets framed as a choice: tech or human, scale or depth, standardization or personalization. These either/or frames flatten the conversation and force false choices. What if AI is breaking the traditional trade-offs? Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review, Xiao-Li Meng and Harvard’s LabXchange team reveal why AI might actually flip the constraints—where more learners enable better personalization, not worse.

Panel

Anne DeMallie - Director of STEM, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

Rachel Miller - Supervisor, Springfield Public Schools

Jessica Booker - Digital Learning Coach, Foxborough Public Schools

Elizabeth Kerrigan - Technology Integration, Sudbury Public Schools

Panel

Lisa Sacchetti - Founder, The Renaissance Network

Phillip Miller -CEO, Skillwell

James Lane - University Instructors

David Raney - Nuventive

Hiring and Building Teams in the age of AI

As AI continues to transform education, it is also redefining the talent behind it. In this panel, Lisa will guide a discussion with several CEOs on how they are rethinking hiring, building AI-ready teams, and identifying the capabilities their organizations will need next. Attendees will gain insight into how these shifts are changing workforce expectations and what it means for educators and leaders preparing students and institutions for what’s ahead.

Lightning Talk

Kellie Fitzgerald - Senior Director of Admissions Operations, NYU

Scaling Student Support with AI: Lessons from NYU’s Ivy.ai Chatbot

NYU successfully implemented the Ivy.ai chatbot to support the growing demand for 24/7 support and reduce the administrative burden of repetitive inquiries. Key benefits realized include offering personalized guidance to students, answering questions in real time regardless of the time of day, and achieving a 13% decrease in routine staff inquiries. This lightning talk will cover the ethical framework, future plans for the chatbot (including expanding the use of Generative AI), and end-user and staff feedback gathered since implementation.

Panel

Ola Ozernov-Palchik -Research Faculty and Scientist, MIT

Rachel Schechter - LXD Research

Kaitlin Dumont - Huron Higher Education Consulting Director

How Do You Evaluate and Select EdTech Tools: Three Perspectives from Three Experts

With AI-powered tools flooding classrooms at every level, how do educators, administrators, and institutions separate genuine impact from compelling marketing? This panel brings together three experts who approach that question from different vantage points; from how universities and schools can build thoughtful, sustainable frameworks for EdTech evaluation and procurement to using learning science as a filter for product selection. Together, they'll tackle the questions decision-makers are asking right now: What does good evidence actually look like? How do you make sound decisions under real-world constraints while still prioritizing evidence? What responsibility do institutions, researchers, and vendors share in raising the bar? And how can institutions enable experimentation with AI-enabled EdTech while maintaining alignment and scaling what works?

Talk

Gabriella Torres - Mass AI Hub & SUNDAI Club

Upskilling Educators in AI

See how Massachusetts AI Hub and SUNDAI Club are using hack based sessions to upskill educators on AI.

Student Hackathon Winners - Presented by Shauna Conway

Human Edge Studio - Students Applying AI to Real-World Challenges

Industry needs talent who can apply AI related skills and understanding in a business context to solve problems and make better decisions. AIxEd partnered with Strategic Growth & Innovation and ELAI on a one-day interdisciplinary experience where students, faculty, and industry mentors work together to apply AI to real-world challenges. In this session you will hear from the top two student teams who were selected by the jury to share their solutions to a predictive AI challenge in financial services.