GenAI Summit Highlights AI Innovation
Recognizing the growing importance of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in computing, researchers from Georgia Tech recently gathered to showcase their advances in the field.
The 2025 Generative AI Summit, organized by the College of Computing and the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS), highlighted Georgia Tech’s strength and diversity in GenAI.
The focus of the summit was presentations of six proposals awarded to Georgia Tech faculty in GenAI. This year’s projects focused on the use of generative AI in science. From the 58 proposals they received across the Institute, six proposals were awarded funding.
This year’s proposal winners included:
- School of Interactive Computing Associate Professor Neha Kumar
- School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Assistant Professor Yunan Luo
- School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Amirali Aghazadeh and Ph.D. student Daniel Saeedi
- CSE Assistant Professor Peng Chen & Ph.D. student Phillip Si
- CSE Assistant Professor Anqi Wu
- CSE Associate Professor Chao Zhang
The summit kicked off with introductory remarks from College of Computing Dean Vivek Sarkar, Executive Vice President for Research Timothy Lieuwen, and IDEaS Director David Sherrill.
Microsoft’s Allen Stewart gave the keynote talk at the summit. Stewart, director of software engineering in Microsoft’s strategic missions and technology divisions, spoke about the company’s AI strategy, how it is using generative AI in its products, and how it is using AI to advance scientific discovery.
School of Computer Science (SCS) faculty Alexey Tumanov and Anand Iyer served as the program co-chairs for this year's summit, and facilitated breakout sessions along with SCS Professor Vijay Ganesh and School of Interactive Computing Associate Professor Judy Hoffman. The sessions explored the foundations of AI, agentic systems, hallucinations, and the future of GenAI.
The summit launched last year after IDEaS received funding from Microsoft to hold a competition for generative AI projects. The competition drew so much participation thatthe summit was created for researchers to present their winning proposals to the broader Georgia Tech GenAI community.
“We wanted to show what the Georgia Tech community is doing in GenAI and allow researchers to make connections across different groups around campus,” said Umakishore Ramachandran, SCS professor and director of CloudHub.
While the summit has mostly been aimed at the Georgia Tech community showcasing its partnership with Microsoft, Ramachandran said future iterations could be open to external partners.
“I have been surprised at the amount of activity in generative AI across campus and think we should be showing that to others,” he said.
Yousef Khalidi is a College of Computing alumnus and a Microsoft corporate vice president. He and Microsoft University Relations Representative Elizabeth Bruce facilitated funding for the GenAI Summit proposal competitions.
