Innovation, Workforce and Research Conference summits — like the one coming to Grand Forks — are meant to shine a light on the locations they're held at and what professionals are doing in those areas, said Melissa Carl, director of business development and career and member services at IEEE-USA.
"It's a way for us to help put that spotlight on some really cool innovation that's going on that maybe not the rest of the country would know about," she said.
IEEE-USA, an organizational unit under the global IEEE (founded under the name Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), is a technical professional organization for a number of technical professions, including engineers, scientists, computer scientists, software engineers, aeronautics engineers and others. The organization is holding the IWRC AI and Autonomy Summit at UND on Wednesday, Sept. 10, to bring together stakeholders, academia and government leaders to forge conversations about innovation in technology and science. The event will particularly put a spotlight on the region's AI, aerospace and autonomous systems. It will be held in the Memorial Union from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The IWRC events are held in small, localized and rural areas, said Leah Laird, senior marketing and communications specialist at IEEE-USA. The summits focus on driving innovation and workforce sectors of the area and bringing together lead stakeholders from academia and the government.
"(It gets) conversations and really important discourse going, so that hopefully that can have an impact on the local area when it comes to the U.S.'s stance and innovation, when it comes to technology and science," she said.
The event coincides with North Dakota Autonomy Week, proclaimed by Gov. Kelly Armstrong. The summit and other events across the state were mentioned in the proclamation, which named North Dakota as a national leader in autonomous systems development and deployment. The proclamation also named UND as a cutting-edge research institution working alongside other industry leaders and public-private partnerships to responsibly develop AI, robotics and autonomy.
"Autonomy Week celebrates the innovators, educators, entrepreneurs, farms and public servants working to ensure that intelligent and autonomous systems benefit all communities across our state," the proclamation said.
Being a leader in AI is one of the big goals for UND this year. During his yearly State of the University address, President Andrew Armacost said the university aims to become the AI university for North Dakota this academic year.
In past comments, Armacost said UND as a campus is focusing on growth in AI and unification around it. The university is navigating how to prepare students in every discipline to be successful in an AI-enabled world, both in their academic disciplines and their careers.
"It's not the blind adoption of new tools," he said. "It's the critical inquiry about what the societal impacts are on AI, what the governance pieces and the legal pieces and frameworks are that we need to understand."
Armacost will have a fireside chat with Program Manager Phillip Smith from the Tactical Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the summit during a networking lunch. Smith is one of the number of guests to the event, including IEEE-USA members, UND faculty and staff, business leaders and others in the region visiting through the day's events. Mayor Brandon Bochenski will also be delivering remarks during the summit.
IEEE-USA will also be holding a conference in October at UND. Carl said it will be more of a traditional IEEE technical conference.
The summit's full agenda and registration is available at https://iwrc.ieeeusa.org/iwrc-grand-forks/.
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