Academic AI: From Policy to Practice
How the University of Akureyri gave researchers, faculty, and students an AI tool they could actually trust
RegisterMost universities are somewhere in the middle of a messy conversation right now: which AI tools to approve, who decides, and what happens when a student cites something that never existed. The University of Akureyri (UNAK) already had that conversation, and then built the infrastructure to back it up.
🗓️ Thursday, May 14th at 11 am EST (3pm GMT)
💻 Live Webinar on Zoom
In this webinar, AI Project Manager Magnús Smári Smárason walks through how UNAK went from no vetted institutional AI tool to a full governance framework, a homegrown hybrid AI platform, and Scite deployed across a 2,800-student institution. Magnús came to this work after sixteen years as a paramedic and firefighter, where "does this actually work under real conditions" was never a theoretical question. He brought that same diagnostic lens to evaluating research AI, and what he found shaped everything UNAK built.
The session closes with a live fireside chat between Magnús and Scite Co-Founder Sean Rife, followed by open Q&A.
You'll come away with:
- A real-world model for building AI policy that has technical teeth, not just good intentions
- A clearer picture of why citation integrity is a governance problem, not just a software problem
- Practical insight into how the Scite MCP fits into institutions that already have AI tools in place
- A framework for who actually needs to be in the room when AI tool decisions get made
Your speakers
Magnús Smári Smárason is AI Project Manager at the University of Akureyri, where he led Iceland's first comprehensive university AI policy and oversees production systems including BORG, UNAK's secure hybrid AI platform. He holds a Master's in Social Sciences (AI & Society), co-authors The Irreducible Human with Brill Publishers, and has spoken at the Oxford AI Summit. Before moving into AI work, he spent sixteen years as a paramedic and firefighter, a background that shaped how he evaluates whether a tool actually performs under real conditions.
Prof. Sean Rife, PhD is a Professor of Psychology at Murray State University and Head of Academic Relations at Research Solutions. He actively uses Scite in his own courses at Murray State, giving him a practitioner's view of what research integrity tools actually look like in the classroom. His scholarly work spans moral and political psychology, metascience, and the sociology of science, with a focus on how AI can help quantify scientific progress and make research discovery more rigorous.