Ferris State’s Tech Week Grand Rapids sessions focus on the growing role of artificial intelligence

Ferris State’s Tech Week Grand Rapids sessions focus on the growing role of artificial intelligence

Ferris State University is playing a key role in Tech Week Grand Rapids presentations looking at how artificial intelligence is playing a growing role in health care and other aspects of society.

Tech Week Grand Rapids is a six-day, community driven “unconference” taking place from Sept. 14 to 19 across the greater Grand Rapids area.

The event has about 160 events including panels, workshops, student showcases and networking mixers that are free and open to the public. Details about the entire event are located here.

These events will explore how AI, data, and emerging technology are transforming clinical care, drug discovery, and patient outcomes through a week of talks, demos, and hands-on sessions from the region's leading health tech organizations.

Sessions hosted by Ferris State faculty and staff are:

AI, Digital Equity, and Rural Education: Closing the AI Divide in Rural and Tribal Communities

Wednesday, Sept. 16, 11 to 11:45 a.m. at Ferris State University’s Kendall College of Art and Design, 17 Pearl Street NW in Grand Rapids.

While society is in the middle of a burgeoning AI revolution, such unprecedented growth has largely been focused on urban and suburban spheres throughout the nation.

However, scant attention has been given to the unequal playing field in rural and Tribal communities, especially here, in Michigan.

This presentation will attempt to cover educational inequities and provide possible solutions to redress such trends.

The presentation will examine the growing trends in AI, but from an often overlooked and lesser-focused perspective, a rural and Tribal community-lens.

This session will not only document the current technological paradigm and disconnect between rural / Tribal and urban / suburban communities, but also note how this gap has been shrinking, as of late.

The session will also explore the paradox of AI in the rural and Tribal sectors, and show how it can be leveraged as a useful tool to bridge the proverbial 'digital divide,' but also how it risks further alienating such traditionally disenfranchised communities.

Leading AI Adoption: People Drive Success: Lead AI Change with Trust, Champions, and Confidence

Wednesday, Sept. 16, 1 to 2 p.m. at Ferris State’s Kendall College of Art and Design, 17 Pearl Street NW in Grand Rapids.

AI is transforming every industry, but successful AI implementation is rarely limited by the technology itself. More often, organizations struggle because of uncertainty, resistance to change, unclear leadership, and a lack of organizational readiness.

This interactive presentation explores the human side of AI adoption and provides practical strategies for leading successful organizational change. Rather than focusing on the latest AI tools, we'll examine the leadership, communication, and change management practices that determine whether AI initiatives succeed or fail.

The session includes audience discussion, real-world examples, and actionable takeaways that leaders can immediately apply regardless of their industry or organization size. It is designed for business leaders, managers, HR professionals, educators, entrepreneurs, and anyone responsible for helping people navigate technological change.

AI at the Bench: PKS Engineering Case Studies

Thursday, Sept. 17, 11 a.m. to noon at Ferris State’s Kendall College of Art and Design, 17 Pearl Street NW in Grand Rapids.

Polyketide synthases are large, assembly-line enzymes that manufacture a variety of chemicals essential for American biotechnological manufacturing, including fuels, medicines, and bulk chemicals. The engineering of PKS systems is complex, however, owing to the large size and complexity of the enzymes.

Engineering of these proteins requires repeated cycles of designing experiments, building genetic constructs, testing performance, and interpreting results. Artificial intelligence can support several stages of this design–build–test–learn, or DBTL, cycle when its outputs are converted into testable scientific hypotheses.

This session features two student-led presentations describing practical AI applications in PKS engineering. The speakers will demonstrate how AI can assist with hypothesis generation, experimental interpretation, identification of promising engineering strategies, and selection of subsequent experiments.

Together, the talks introduce the concept of “AI-in-the-DBTL-cycle,” placing AI within the scientific process rather than above it. AI serves as a scientific sounding board, helping undergraduates anticipate experimental outcomes and interpret their results more quickly.

CHARM: Practical AI for Healthcare Data: AI and Dashboards for Smarter Antibiotic Stewardship

Thursday, Sept. 17, 1:15 to 2 p.m. at Ferris State University’s Kendall College of Art and Design, 17 Pearl Street NW in Grand Rapids.

How can AI move beyond experimentation and solve practical problems using real-world healthcare data?This session will introduce Collaboration to Harmonize Antimicrobial Registry Measures – known as CHARM -- an antimicrobial stewardship initiative that transforms healthcare data into actionable insights through interactive dashboards and analytics.

Attendees will see how CHARM uses data from participating healthcare organizations to examine antibiotic prescribing patterns, identify opportunities for improvement, and support antimicrobial stewardship efforts.The session will then showcase two AI projects being developed around the CHARM data ecosystem. The first uses locally hosted, open-source large language models to standardize prescription data while keeping sensitive healthcare data within a controlled environment.

The project combines structured data processing, retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning, systematic evaluation, and human review to improve accuracy while reducing hallucinations and manual data-cleaning effort.The second project, CHARM Outlier, uses machine learning to identify antibiotic prescriptions that differ from expected prescribing patterns. Flagged records are presented through a web application where researchers and healthcare professionals can review them and provide feedback.

That feedback is then used to improve the model’s future predictions, creating a human-in-the-loop approach to identifying potentially inappropriate prescribing.Together, these projects demonstrate how dashboards, locally deployed LLMs, machine learning, and human expertise can work together to turn complex healthcare data into useful information while addressing practical concerns around privacy, accuracy, and responsible AI implementation.

AI Adoption for Healthcare and Public Health: Practical Steps for Responsible Healthcare AI Adoption

Thursday, Sept. 17, 2:15 to 3 p.m. at Ferris State University’s Kendall College of Art and Design, 17 Pearl Street NW in Grand Rapids.

Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, but many healthcare and public health organizations still struggle to move from experimentation to meaningful and sustainable adoption.In this presentation and interactive Q&A, attendees will explore the difference between simply using an AI tool and successfully integrating AI into real organizational workflows. Attendees will learn about practical AI applications such as data cleaning and standardization, automated reporting, prescribing outlier detection, dashboards, decision support, and natural-language analytics. The session will also examine important risks, including privacy, bias, hallucinations, incorrect outputs, explainability, and the need for human review.A real-world case study from the CHARM will demonstrate how secure data pipelines, analytics, small language models, machine learning, and natural-language reporting can support antimicrobial stewardship.The session is designed for healthcare professionals, public health leaders, technology professionals, students, researchers, business leaders, and organizations exploring practical AI implementation.

Applied LLMs in Pharmacy Practice: AI Projects Improving Pharmacy Workflows and Decisions

Thursday, Sept. 17, 3:15 to 4 p.m. at Ferris State University’s Kendall College of Art and Design, 17 Pearl Street NW in Grand Rapids.

We are presenting novel AI capabilities in support of the CHARM, whose centralized dashboard is hosted and supported by the Ferris State University College of Pharmacy.

The first of two completed projects extends that dashboard — a web-based Power BI environment — with a conversational interface. Instead of drilling through filters and report screens, users simply ask a question in plain language.

Behind the scenes, a text-to-SQL layer paired with a large language model interprets the question, translates it into a valid query, and returns the matching data.

Every request is validated before it runs, and privacy safeguards are built-in to keep patient data protected and HIPAA-compliant, so faster access never comes at the cost of trust.

‍The second project applies the same technology to the business side of pharmacy practice. It automates the groundwork behind pharmacy service planning: prospect identification, market analysis, and the assembly of a comprehensive report that a pharmacy owner or health-system leader can review and act on.

Work that once consumed many hours of manual research now takes a fraction of the time, freeing pharmacists and administrators to focus where their expertise actually matters — judgment, strategy, and patient care.