→Husker AI Days 2026: Complete. Final report in production.
Day 4: Teaching & Learning CoP
Day 8: OpenAI Day + Great Prairie AI Show
Day 9: NU Graduate College Workshop
Monday, April 13 | Husker AI Days is off and running.
About 30 students packed KH A203 for the "Is It Fake?" Promptathon, an AI image competition inspired by "Is It Cake?" Teams created AI-generated images of fictional campus moments, then everyone voted on which were real and which were AI. The quality of the AI images genuinely surprised the room. Team Magicans won with a classroom scene generated in ChatGPT that fooled nearly everyone. Chaeda took the "Sharpest Eyes" award for best detection.
The Innovation Showcase followed with two standout student projects: Euclides presented his EER UNL Diary 2.0, a desktop app helping PhD students track program milestones, and Amlan demonstrated Weed Vision AI, an automated agricultural image labeling system that processes 120 images per hour (compared to 15-22 manually) using a 10,000-image dataset of Palmer Amaranth.
Tuesday, April 14 | The biggest single day of Husker AI Days.
Google, Nelnet, and Zion brought a full team to Kiewit Hall for 121 registrants. Hilary Kasel anchored from Google, with John Vialpando from Nelnet and Arun Reddy and Chandra Pillutla from Zion as the day's core collaborators. Satish Venugopal, Byron Ferguson, and Jacob Walker rounded out the team with demonstrations and workshops. The day opened with a fireside chat on AI literacy as a graduation requirement and closed with a working dinner at Dish.
The architecture was the story. Gemini Enterprise runs inside a private cloud tenant where institutional data never leaves. Connectors place existing tools inside the workspace and inherit each user's permissions. Deep Research is curatable before it runs. Afternoon workshops translated all of that into working agents (a Big Ten benchmarking tool, a Lincoln vacation planner, a Jarvis-style schedule manager) and NotebookLM plus Deep Research faculty workflows, built in a single sitting.
Wednesday, April 15 | Where Google showed what AI can generate, MathWorks showed what AI must survive.