A group of 7 students standing in line and smiling

ASU students unveil AI tools to improve campus life

Lori K. Baker

May 1, 2026

Imagine tapping into the power of artificial intelligence to help students navigate the vast expanse of Arizona State University’s programs and services. Or creating an AI-powered companion to help time-pressed university students study more efficiently and effectively.

Eight student interns with the university’s AI Acceleration team turned these possibilities into reality and unveiled their prototypes to ASU Chief Information Officer Lev Gonick on April 30 as part of the AI Acceleration Student Innovation Challenge.

The challenge invited students to design and pitch AI solutions that enhance everyday campus experiences. The program put students at the center of AI product design to better support learning, well-being and engagement.

“Not only do they have design aspirations for solving problems they actually face as students, but they demonstrated they can build and deploy AI tools to do it,” Gonick said. “I’m continuing to be amazed by what our students are capable of doing.”

One of the two four-member teams, Prince Rwamatwara, Anitah Murungi, Abhishek Sethuraman and Shamiim Namulema, presented ASUHub Social, a centralized AI-supported platform designed to streamline access to campus events, office hours, study room bookings and cross-campus engagement. The tool is especially helpful for students moving between ASU campuses.

“ASU is one of the largest universities in North America, and it has all these amazing resources everywhere. But it takes a lot of time to navigate it and try to find information for yourself,” said Murungi.

The second team, Abraham Lozano Serna, Alex Ababu, Mariam Serghat and Mudi Erhueh, presented SparkPack, an AI tool that connects with Canvas, a cloud-based learning management system, to help students organize study materials and identify learning gaps before exams.

“The great thing about SparkPack is it is structured, student-specific and can be personalized,” Serghat said.

Prior to the April 30 event, the student teams honed their pitches with experts from AI Acceleration, using available resources, mentorship and opportunities to push their ideas forward. “The leadership at Enterprise Technology really came through for us,” Murungi said. “We were coached on how to identify and understand our users, pitch our solution and present our value proposition. Having someone guide us through that process has been super amazing.”

The AI Acceleration Student Innovation Challenge was kicked off with ideation presentations on January 16, inspiring connection and creativity in students who shared early AI-powered concepts. Over the next several weeks, student teams continued to refine their concepts into prototypes before pitching their projects to Gonick for consideration to move into production.

“This is a chance for us to amplify these two fabulous student projects,” Gonick said. “We will work with the students to find ways to productize and scale their solutions and bring them to market. Our CreateAI environment is a robust marketplace for students, faculty and staff to share their AI projects across the ASU community.”