Data centers enable many of the digital services that we see as central to modern life, from artificial intelligence (AI) applications to online financial transactions to cloud computing and video streaming. However, data centers also require significant energy and water resources, potentially straining local utility grids and municipal water supplies and contributing to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

In an increasingly technology-shaped world, emerging tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not just tools — they are social systems that shape opportunity, equity, and power.   This session blends personal storytelling, reflective activities, and accessible tech concepts to help participants explore their role as engaged citizens in the AI era by discovering their unique superpowers to: 

Asian American youth literature had a slow start in the early twentieth century. Books were mostly in the genres of folk and fairy tales and written by outsiders at that time. There were books about Asians in Asia, but almost nothing about Asians in the United States. After World War II and the Korean War, some books about Japanese American incarceration and Korean War orphans emerged, but it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement that more books shared stories of Asians in the United States.

Trinidad-born, Chicago-based artist Sherwin Ovid works across painting and mixed media to explore themes of migration, memory, and material transformation. His layered works combine pigment, resin, and found substances such as dirt and fabric, reflecting on cultural transmission and the intersections of visibility, movement, and belonging. 

Dr. David Livingstone Smith views understanding dehumanization that leads to moral atrocities as central to effectively resisting its harms.

In contrast to many other philosophical and psychological positions, Smith theorizes that to dehumanize people is to literally conceive of them as monstrous creatures, not merely lesser humans or animals. He argues that this can be true even if, paradoxically, the same people contemporaneously conceive of them as human. 

Ashlynn Stillwell, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will discuss her work on sustainable water and energy systems. Water and energy are closely linked resources with clean water and sanitation services dependent on energy, and fuels production and electric power generation dependent on water. This water-energy nexus spreads across scales to include large-scale infrastructure systems, societal trends and patterns, and individual behaviors.