Cover Photo Credit: Donna Fisk, Fisk Foto LLC
On Jan. 11, 2025, members of the newly formed D-E Student Committee on AI attended the Student Artificial Intelligence Summit at Newark Academy alongside other schools, including the hosting school, Morristown Beard School, Pingry, and Kent Place.
“The student presentations explored the diverse applications and advantages of AI tools, highlighting their transformative capabilities across various fields”
“The conference was a wonderful opportunity for our students to network with students from other schools and learn more about Artificial Intelligence,” says Ms. Diana Gross, Chief Innovation Officer, who chaperoned the students with Mr. Bill Campbell, Associate Director of Technology for Academics. Both Ms. Gross and Mr. Campbell are advisors for the D-E Student Committee on AI.
Five of our students—Soham Bafana ’25, Hudson Guzman ’27, Jason Lee ’27, Derin Sezgin ’28, and Sylvie Yao ’27—also volunteered to lead a showcase or breakout session.
“The student presentations explored the diverse applications and advantages of AI tools, highlighting their transformative capabilities across various fields,” says Ms. Gross. “Many of our students are exploring AI from multiple perspectives, including coding, ethical considerations, inherent biases, environmental impact, and its influence on job sectors like Journalism, Finance, Healthcare, and the Arts.”
For example, Derin discussed using AI in “fake news” detection because, he says, “I feel that fake news, with the advent of social media, is getting more and more dangerous.” His theoretical model would serve as a social media fact-checker.
In addition, Soham presented on the challenge of keeping educational AI policies current with rapid advancements of AI; Hudson discussed how AI could be used to diagnose complex health conditions; and Jason discussed the bias of AI.
Sylvie followed up her lecture on an image classification application called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) by splitting students into smaller groups to discuss how apps like Google Photos use this AI tool.
“This experience reinforces the importance of teaching digital literacy, ethics, and responsible technology use to prepare students for future academic and career pathways”
“For me, the most valuable part [of the conference] was the student-centered nature of the summit,” says Mr. Campbell. “[Almost] every session was presented by a high school student. This provided students an authentic reason to put together a presentation and share something significant with peers.”
Sylvie says, “Looking back on the AI Summit, I am going to take away that AI has so many diverse and unique uses that are often overlooked or not talked about enough…I was aware of the extent to which AI was expanding but going to the AI Summit showed me how much AI has grown…[It] is constantly changing and inevitably will play a big role in the future.”
Ms. Gross adds that for faculty, “This experience reinforces the importance of teaching digital literacy, ethics, and responsible technology use to prepare students for future academic and career pathways.”
