It was a real showstopper: a plug-in hybrid Ferrari Testarossa parked inside the Miami Beach Convention Center. All that was missing was a silk-blazered Don Johnson, who tooled around town in an earlier version of the supercar as detective Sonny Crockett in “Miami Vice.”
But while the gleaming, rust-colored Ferrari may have turned heads at the global tech conference eMerge Americas, where it was on display April 23-24, it was University of Miami faculty and students who employed substance over style, showcasing their research and innovations that included everything from a portable VR headset that performs multiple eye tests in half the time it takes a clinician to a patient simulator that registers a heartbeat, breathes, and talks.
The 2026 edition of eMerge, of which the University is a sponsor, featured 400 exhibitors, some 300 speakers, and pavilions that showcased AI, heathtech, robotics, fintech, and national security.
At the University’s eMerge exhibit space, School of Education and Human Development doctoral student Daija Boyd detailed for an audience how her new AI-powered educational tool creates personalized curriculums for students with disabilities who may otherwise fall between the cracks.
Existing individualized educational plans are static and reactive and tend to stigmatize such students by using “deficit language” to describe how they failed to perform certain skills, Boyd said. The new Learning Identity Plan she created with undergraduate student Madison Gaynor uses personality to track in real time a student’s growth and their ability to remain engaged.
“This is not pigeonholing, and it’s not a horoscope where you take a personality test,” Boyd, a former Broward County schoolteacher, said at the conference. “We're not just looking at what a student is lacking. We’re taking into consideration who the student inherently is to create their educational plan.”
Graduate student Tianyu Ma explained how her research examines the nature in which AI is reshaping the teaching and learning process. “Rather than treating AI as a tool that replaces teaching or improves individual performance, I study how it changes the structure of collaboration—how people interact, coordinate tasks, and build knowledge together,” said the fourth-year computer science Ph.D. student.
While AI can be effective at making collaboration more visible and organized, it is much less developed in supporting deeper forms of collaboration, such as designing tasks that require interdependence or helping groups build shared understanding, Ma said.
“My research seeks to understand this gap and explore how we can design AI-supported learning environments that promote meaningful collaboration, especially for students,” said Ma, pointing out that her study builds on her broader research experience studying collaboration in data-rich, game-based learning environments.
Christopher Lay and Emma Mullen, students in the School of Nursing and Health Studies’ B.S.N.-D.N.P. Nurse Anesthesia program, presented their research on “Performing and Educating on Gastric Ultrasound Using the I‑AIM Framework.”
For anesthesia providers, gastric point-of-care ultrasound can be an accurate and reliable tool to objectively assess gastric content and aspiration risk, but a lack of standardized education has prevented its widespread use in clinical practice, according to Lay.
To help ramp up its use, Lay and Emma propose the adoption of teaching techniques using the I-AIM (indications, image acquisition, image interpretation, and medical decision-making) framework, which they say integrates all the essential elements of a diagnostic ultrasound evaluation. Using students as mock patients, the two employed the IAM framework to help teach a gastric ultrasound component during a School of Nursing class last summer. “Research surrounding gastric ultrasound and its education among anesthesia providers will hopefully bridge this from being a useful skill to a standard of care in the pre-operative setting,” Mullen said.
Boyd, Ma, Lay, and Mullen were four of a handful of students who shared the spotlight with faculty researchers during the two-day eMerge conference, which, in addition to AI, also explored innovations in health care, finance, and national security.
School of Law professor Andres Sawicki, who teaches and conducts research around intellectual property, discussed generative AI and its terms of service, detailing its achievements but also warning about its downsides. “There are a lot of good reasons to talk about generative AI,” said Sawicki, noting that GenAI models achieved gold-level scores at last year’s International Mathematical Olympiad and that the technology has produced award-winning art and even passed the bar exam.
“But in addition to these amazing achievements, generative AI also comes with some notable downsides. For example, deepfakes,” he said. “We also have the problem of AI-induced psychosis or at least allegations of AI induced psychosis. Moreover, there are risks of chemical, radiological and biological weapons that are amplified by this technology. Nonetheless, I’m here to convince you or to try to persuade you at least that in addition to all these amazing things and terrifying risks, we should pay attention to the fine print.”
Sawicki, who is also director of data ethics and society at the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing, was referring to the terms and conditions that attach to the use of GenAI, a type of artificial intelligence that can create original content such as text, images, video, and software code in response to a user’s prompt or request.
As part of his groundbreaking work in this field, Sawaicki, along with professor John Newman of the University of Memphis, is conducting the first large-scale effort to systematically document how firms in the burgeoning generative AI ecosystem are using their terms and conditions to impose legal restrictions on user behavior. The two are studying more than 100 GenAI firms to provide a data-driven analysis of this issue.
News of the Louisiana man who recently shot and killed eight children, including seven of his own, and seriously wounded his wife and a woman believed to be his girlfriend shocked the nation, immediately eliciting outcries that too much gun violence still exists in the U.S. and that stricter gun-control laws are needed.
But the current makeup of firearms data, such as the number of nonfatal shootings, is disordered and highly segmented, making it difficult for policymakers to enact effective measures to combat the problem, Alex Piquero, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminology in the College of Arts and Sciences, said during his eMerge talk “Gun Violence: Use of Data to Guide Policy.”
“So, we risk making policies that are based not on good data or bad data, but no data,” Piquero said.
Part of the solution, he said, lies in technology. “Some police departments already report these data out, but it’s not uniform throughout the 18,000-some-odd agencies,” said Piquero, who, during a one-year stint as director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, started collecting information on fatal and nonfatal shootings in the U.S. “But we do have software that can go across various police department websites and scrape those data and use AI to summarize it. In 2026, when we have flight tracking technology that can monitor nearly all commercial flights globally in real-time, we should be able to have the exact same amount of knowledge with respect to gun violence.”
At the UHealth Innovation Hub, communications health specialists demonstrated the AI-powered Heru VR headset, an FDA-registered wearable device that digitizes and automates multiple eye exams traditionally performed with bulky, manual equipment. Developed by Bascom Palmer Eye Institute ophthalmologist Mohamed Abou Shousha, the device leverages artificial intelligence and virtual reality to deliver a comprehensive suite of vision tests such as visual acuity, eye alignment, eye motility, visual field, and color vision.
Already in use at Bascom Palmer, the headset is 37 percent faster than manual devices, resulting in a 32 percent increase in physician productivity and a 33 percent reduction in patient wait times, said UHealth spokesperson Emily Delgado, noting that the goal is to implement the device’s use in eye clinics around the world.
Dr. Ivette Motola, a professor of emergency medicine at the Miller School of Medicine, demonstrated one of the high-tech patient mannequins used at the Gordon Center for Simulation and Innovation in Medical Education to train health care professionals.
“The human body is incredible and complex and miraculous in so many ways,” said Motola, who also serves as associate director of the Gordon Center. “One of the challenges of technology is re-creating its functions. Our mannequin breathes, has heart sounds, pupillary responses, and can blink. We can stick needles into it, and we can intubate it.”
In other notable talks and panels:
- On the eMerge mainstage, Dr. Stephen D. Nimer, director of the National Cancer Institute-designated Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Miller School of Medicine, led a discussion on “Living Better, Longer: Wellness and Cancer Prevention in the AI Era.” The panel, which also included Sylvester’s Tracy Crane, associate professor, co-leader of the Cancer Control Research Program, director of digital health and lifestyle medicine for Cancer Survivorship, highlighted how technology is enabling behavior change, strengthening resilience, and reducing disease risk and examined how real-time data and predictive models are empowering individuals and health care systems to employ proactive strategies to reshape longevity, extend independence, and redefine what it means to age well.
- Mauricio Angee, chief information security officer at UHealth – University of Miami Health System and the Miller School of Medicine, participated on the panel “Digital Health, Real Risks: Safeguarding Community Health in the AI Era.”
- Yelena Yesha, Knight Foundation Endowed Chair of Data Science and AI and Innovation Officer at the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing, participated on the panel “The Future of Learning: AI, Entrepreneurship, and Reimagining Higher Education.”
- Serona Elton, professor and chair of the Department of Music Industry at the Frost School of Music and interim vice dean, spoke on “Artificial Intelligence and Music Licensing: The Current State of Affairs.”
