Do you remember walking into an arcade as a child? Your gaze darting back and forth, overwhelmed by the plethora of options?
That’s how it felt entering the exhibit hall at this year’s Educause conference, where some 7,000 attendees — many in the information-technology field — descended this week in Chicago for panels, networking, and conversations with tech exhibitors.
The energy was different from when I attended the annual gathering for the first time, in 2021. That year’s conference, in Philadelphia, saw less than half that number of people. The exhibit hall still boasted scores of vendors — 214, to be exact — but with Covid-19 still raging, there was apprehension about getting too snug. (Color-coded stickers on our attendee badges indicated our comfort level with interactions.)
But this week, it was all about mingling. Some 300 vendors were eager to engage — to draw folks’ attention to their products and services. Meta had erected a mock lab, complete with lab coats and vials, to have people test its VR headsets. Pathify, which creates one-stop-shop platforms for student engagement, set up mock tiki bars, covered in flashing leis and Groucho-style glasses (a staff member told me the decor was a nod to Halloween, and meant to “create ambiance.”) The ed-tech company D2L had an actual arcade game — a claw machine — with teddy bears and foam footballs as prizes. HelioCampus, a data-analytics company, was warming up cookies in a toaster oven. A steady hum of hundreds of voices reverberated off the walls.
A large proportion of the hall’s exhibitors were promoting products geared toward data security — a reflection, at least in part, of the growing threat of cyberattacks in higher ed. (The past few months alone have seen attacks on institutions including the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Tennessee’s Chattanooga State Community College). Admittedly, though, I often found myself drawn to what felt like the belle of the ball: tools powered or supported by artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT was the demo. This is the product.
One of the first I happened across was Pria, an AI-powered “virtual mentor” from Praxis AI that came out in January. In practice, the tool sounded like ChatGPT: The user asks a question, and Pria generates an answer. But David James Clarke IV, president and chief executive of Praxis AI, was quick to identify what he believes sets Pria — a plug-in that can be integrated into a campus’s learning-management system — apart. While ChatGPT could, until recently, only access information from September 2021 or earlier through OpenAI’s training database, Clarke said Pria is trained on a host of up-to-date and “scholarly” sources, including Google Scholar, GitHub, and PubMed. Pria also provides citations in its reply to a question (in case the user would like to fact-check), and is reportedly unable to “hallucinate,” or make up answers.
“ChatGPT was the demo,” he said. “This is the product.” Clarke said around two dozen U.S. colleges are using Pria now, but that the company is in conversations with many, including the State University of New York system and some HBCUs and tribal colleges.
Another company, AMSimpkins & Associates, had a stand in the hall’s Emerging Tech Zone for a new product that helps colleges identify fraudulent applications (in which the applicant is not a student but is trying to steal financial aid). It’s an increasingly prevalent issue, Maurice and Laqwacia Simpkins, the husband-and-wife business duo, told me; it can cost colleges hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Their product, S.A.F.E. (Student Application Fraud Examination), sits on top of a college’s customer-relationship management system and scans all incoming applications, using data — IP addresses, names, email addresses, etc. — and machine learning to flag whether an application may be fraudulent and requires an extra set of (human) eyes. The Simpkinses told me that since releasing S.A.F.E. earlier this year, they have attracted about 10 U.S. college partners, including Louisiana State University, with more in the pipeline.
I did find myself occasionally pulled away from AI, though. After all, my game plan had been to chat up any company whose name and product I’d never heard of but that caught my eye during an initial sweep of the venue.
Some weren’t selling a newly minted product or service but trying to increase the visibility of existing ones. One, ColorID, offers a range of services tied to ID management — including those that use biometrics. For colleges trying to minimize congestion in high-traffic places on campus, ColorID offers software and scanners for iris and fingerprint recognition in lieu of physical ID checks, which can require standing in line. David Stallsmith, the director of product management, told me that while the vast majority of the company’s more than 600 U.S. partners still use physical ID cards for students, biometric scanning is slowly gaining traction. The University of Georgia, for example, uses iris recognition for access to its dining halls.
“The tech is there, and the market is there,” Stallsmith said. “People are just watching each other like, ‘Who’s going to jump first?’”
I asked about implications for data privacy. Stallsmith said iris and fingerprint scans are not tied to identifiable students; they are saved as encrypted numbers in a database.
In another aisle, Pope Tech was promoting accessibility software that, among other things, can plug into the Canvas learning-management system and help instructors identify features in their courses that may inhibit students with disabilities, such as missing alternative text for images and poor color contrast. Mark Pope, a web-accessibility specialist, said clients encouraged the company to get a booth this year, to raise awareness.
One of the last booths I stopped at, for Glowforge, was a bit of a unicorn, with actual hardware — its 3D laser printer and engraver — on display. It has many higher-ed applications, Brett Becker, the company’s national education-partnership manager, told me: Architecture students, for example, can use it to build models of buildings. Theater departments can use it to build props for a set. An intricately designed sword, perhaps.
The example caught me off guard, but I was intrigued. “How long would that take?”
He thought. “Couple of minutes.”
