The University of South Carolina’s Division of IT transformed AI Day into a campus-wide milestone. Its inaugural event attracted over 700 attendees including same-day registrations. The event itself was extensive, featuring 14 breakout sessions, 35 poster presentations and two panel discussions focused on practical, ethical, real-world applications of AI.
Key statistics
- The audience represented a broad and highly engaged cross-section of the university community: staff (47.5%), faculty (19.8%) and graduate students (13%).
- More than half of attendees identified as beginners in AI.
- Sessions earned an average rating of 4.6 out of 5, and the poster sessions attracted more than 200 viewers.
Poster presentation winners
Category 1: Teaching, Learning, and Student Support
First Place: Kasie Roark / “Shaping the Future of Medicine: AI Initiatives at USC
SOMC”
Second Place: Dana Talbert / “Cocky Scholar: Supplementing Study. Not Substituting.”
Category 2: AI Strategy, Operations, and Society
First Place: Keah Tandon / “Automating Literature Synthesis: Parsing and Structuring
PDF Highlights”
Second Place: Kate Lehman / “Student Perceptions of AI: Leveraging Data from Recent
College Graduates to Inform Campus AI Policies”
Category 3: AI for Health, Science, Engineering, and Cybersecurity
First Place: Ogheneyoma Aghoghovbia / “Machine-Learning Driven Discovery of Sodium
and Lithium Superionic Conductors via Lattice Dynamics Descriptors”
Second Place: Amith Gorthi Srinivasa Prabhakara Narasimha / “Hardware Offloading for Encrypted Traffic Classification Using P4-DPDK on SmartNICs”
Zoom Choice Poster Award (Sponsored by Zoom)
Sicheng Wang / “From Biosignals to Intervention: A Multimodal AI Framework for Real-Time
Nurse Burnout Detection”
The impact
AI Day did more than attract a crowd. It brought together faculty, staff, students and partners around a shared, values-aligned view of AI. The event showed both demand and momentum for a recurring AI event at USC.
AI Day at USC 2026 established a promising foundation: high turnout, strong feedback and clear appetite for accessible, practical AI programming.