One-U Responsible AI Initiative

9:25–10:10 | Invited Talk: "Utah’s Leading Role in Shaping the Future of AI"

In this new age of AI, Utah stepped out early and significantly, leading on many fronts: regulatory policy, industry innovation, and academic leadership, to name a few. As AI becomes more and more a part of our everyday lives, and with the promises and perils coming into clearer focus, how can Utah lead out in shaping the future of AI that is focused on leveraging the greatest opportunities while preserving what it means to be human?

Margaret Woolley Busse was appointed by Governor Spencer Cox in January 2021 to serve as a member of his cabinet as the Executive Director of Utah’s Department of Commerce, Utah’s chief business regulatory agency. With an MBA from Harvard University and degrees in public policy and economics from Brigham Young University, Ms. Busse brings a wealth of experience in public service, social impact, and strategy consulting to her role.

Ms. Busse is passionate about bringing trust back to technology, as it is crucial for Utah’s economy to thrive. Under her leadership, with direction from Governor Cox, the Department of Commerce has played a key role in holding social media platforms accountable for their harm to minors by helping to craft appropriate legislative measures and by filing lawsuits against TikTok, Meta, and Snap. In the emerging field of artificial intelligence, Ms. Busse, in partnership with the Utah legislature, has driven forward an innovative approach to AI, which includes the creation of the Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, which is tasked with both providing regulatory relief to qualifying AI-focused companies and making regulatory policy recommendations through its policy learning lab. This new office enables Utah to encourage innovation, protect the public, and proactively observe and learn when it comes to the substantial new powers of AI. Through the work of this new office, Utah’s legislators passed a groundbreaking law that both creates guardrails and an innovation pathway for mental health chatbots. Finally, Ms. Busse worked with Utah’s legislature to pass the Utah Digital Choice Act—the first of its kind in the nation—to enable users to fully control and move their data seamlessly amongst social media platforms.

Ms. Busse has been named a Most Influential Woman by Utah Business Magazine, received the Cyber Pioneer Award from the Utah Bar Association, was a Utah Women in Tech award finalist, and received RevRoad’s Championing Women in Business award. Ms. Busse is a Utah native, and she and her husband, Franz, have five children, ages 12 to 22. Her passion for public service began with many years of leadership roles in local government.

McClenny will explore the intersection of responsible AI and real-world, physics-based systems. Drawing from his experience as a pilot and his Ph.D. research at Texas A&M and the U.S. Army Research Lab, the talk will highlight how AI models, especially physics-informed neural networks, are being used to solve complex physical problems, from material science to fluid dynamics.

McClenny will share lessons learned from developing TensorDiffEq, a multi-GPU training framework, and how these innovations raise new questions about accountability, transparency, and ethical deployment in high-stakes environments. The session will also touch on generative AI’s role in materials informatics and the importance of grounding AI in physical reality to ensure responsible outcomes.

Rather than a technical deep dive, this will be a thought-leadership talk aimed at sparking discussion around how we define and uphold responsibility when AI systems interact with the physical world.

McClenny leads the Global AI Solutions Engineering team at Cisco, driving technical strategy across compute, networking, and security for AI infrastructure. Before joining Cisco, he led AI and emerging technology initiatives at Booz Allen Hamilton, supporting the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community partners with their AI modernization goals.