Align & Engage: IAI speakers from NVIDIA, Insight, share career advice

The University of Georgia Institute for Artificial Intelligence hosted Align & Engage: Spotlight on new IAI Fellows on Friday, Oct. 10 in the Tate Student Center. The afternoon included keynote remarks on AI in Practice from a panel of corporate guests from NVIDIA, Insight, and SADA.

After a greeting from Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Dean Anna Stenport, Marshall Shepherd, associate dean for research scholarship and partnerships, introduced the panel who spoke in succession.

Steven Strickland, a Senior Principal at Insight, oversees market development and solution sales for 5G network infrastructure. In this role, he engages with enterprise and public sector clients to design, deploy, and manage networks that provide the high-speed, low-latency connectivity needed for AI, IoT, edge computing, and other operational use cases.

Strickland shared his perspective on the current state of AI security and convergence across cloud, as well as various Insight projects and partnerships including Insight Titanium Black with Dell Computer. He spoke about opportunities for students in the AI market for infrastructure, including Xperience AI, Dragonfruit, and Radius implementation, 5G Network Services, and using agentic AI for preventive maintenance.

McSwain, a Senior Solutions Architect at NVIDIA, works with Dell OEM and channel partners to demonstrate and design generative AI solutions—including NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NIMs, AI Workbench, Isaac Sim for autonomous mobile robots, and Morpheus—alongside GPU-accelerated platforms like Brev and Run:ai. With broad experience as an engineer, educator and entrepreneur, he spoke broadly about AI’s effect on the job market encouraging students to leverage technology toward their career goals. Though it represents a “very tough job market,” content moderation utilizing AI holds promise for doctoral and master’s students. McSwain repeated advice to integrate tools and models into their career goals.

“NVIDIA has provided the canvas to develop the skills for tomorrow,” McSwain said. “Do more than one thing, there are always going to gaps somewhere. Move to where the nerds are – and remember you can always take matters into your own hands and build it yourself.”

The day’s final industry speaker was Hayden Holland, a Cloud security & AI governance manager at SADA, an Insight Company. Hayden leads the security engineering team and leverages a decade of experience across the Cloud landscape. Focused on professional services consulting, Holland spoke about the challenges companies face in adopting AI securely. With malicious botnets now supercharged by AI, the market “has exploded for building security products.” He spoke about realistic cybersecurity, contrasting security of the cloud vs security in the cloud, the concept of zero trust, authority, and data governance. 

‘Things that pre-dated AI will not go away,” Holland said. “Abstraction layers will change, context will stay the same.”

IAI director Prashant Doshi invited a brief round of questions to the panelists from the audience, which was followed by ten-minute talks by the new IAI Fellows:

• Hee Yun Lee, Thomas P. Holland Distinguished Professor, School of Social Work
• Akshat Lakhiwal, Assistant Professor of MIS, Terry College of Business
• Zhen Xiang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Franklin College of Arts & Sciences
• Tao Liu, Assistant Professor of Precision Forestry, Warnell School of Forestry
• Jie Lu, Assistant Professor of Workforce Ed. & Instruction Tech., Early College of Education

The day ended with breakout sessions, organized by IAI associate director Kyle Johnsen, involving five working groups on convergent themes:

• AI in Education
• Ethics of AI
• AI & Future of Health and Work
• AI for 3F (Farm, Food, Forest)
• AI for Cyber & Societal Security

Each offered reports on their progress, and the event was adjourned.