The two companies, Anthropic and Percepta, plan to integrate their AI services into multiple agencies, including the Maryland Department of Labor and Department of the Environment, Moore wrote in a statement. The Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropic organization, is financially supporting the effort.

“Leveraging AI will accelerate our push to fight poverty, turn renters into homeowners, and ensure every Marylander can access essential services like nutrition and financial support,” Moore said in the announcement.

Under the partnership, state workers will get access to Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, while Percepta will embed staff within agencies to facilitate AI adoption. The announcement did not specify exactly how workers will use Claude or how many will gain access.

[Maryland to face nearly $1.4 billion budget deficit in 2026 legislative session]

“Claude will supercharge the work of public servants to make government more accessible and responsive,” Thiyagu Ramasamy, Anthropic’s public sector head, said in the announcement.

Maryland residents applying for benefits like food stamps can wait up to 30 days to receive them, according to the Maryland Department of Human Services website. The state’s new partnership aims to reduce these wait times and streamline the permitting process for new housing, though state officials did not provide specific targets or timelines in the announcement.

Maryland will also launch a Claude-powered virtual assistant to help residents apply for benefits and find programs they qualify for. A similar chatbot was launched in June and helped connect more than 600,000 kids to summer food benefits, according to the announcement.

“Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful tool for change,” Moore said. “We’ve been clear since Day One that it wouldn’t be enough to rebuild someone else’s broken government — we need to innovate.”

The event, hosted by the University Career Center through the computer, mathematical and natural sciences college, was held amid an increasingly challenging job market for STEM graduates. The panel of four alumni — all from this university — took turns offering advice to an attentive student audience, who ate pizza and asked questions during the presentation.

Khan, who graduated in 2024 and now works at Morgan Stanley, recommended a repetition-based approach to applying: change your resume after five consecutive rejections, ask someone “smarter than you” to review it after 10 and seek out a mentor after 20.

“The only reason why I got my job is because of the dozens of people that have helped me before,” Khan said.

Another panelist, Fenil Gholani, told students about the importance of refining their communication skills.

[UMD STEM students worry about impact of AI, federal workforce cuts on job market]

“You gotta be constantly talking to different kinds of people,” said Gholani, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2021 and a master’s in cybersecurity in 2022.

Now a software engineer at Yahoo, Gholani recommended practicing networking to build confidence in professional settings.

The panel gave some students useful advice for navigating the job search. Shivani Nadella, a sophomore computer science major, attended the event to learn from alumni who have gone through similar challenges.

“It’s always good to talk to industry or people that already have the jobs you’re going for,” Nadella said. “Everyone had really specific, great advice.”

Nadella said she has been actively applying to jobs and frequently attending career events at this university. Changes to the job market brought by artificial intelligence have created challenges, she said, especially as students increasingly compete with automation for entry-level positions.

[UMD students protest defense contractors attending STEM career fair]

“You have to make sure you’re doing something unique or contributing something that is taking human intelligence or human skill that can’t be automated,” Nadella said.

Research published in August by Stanford University reported that workers aged 22 to 25 in fields where AI can automate tasks — including software engineering — have experienced employment declines of up to 13 percent since late 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT.

Despite the challenges, the speakers at Tuesday’s event stressed the importance of resilience while toughing out the job application process.

Rebecca Ryan, program director for the University Career Center at the computer, mathematical and natural sciences college, organized the event as part of a broader effort to support students during what she described as an abnormal time in the job market.

Ryan said the goal was to bring students together to hear from alumni who could validate their struggles while offering them guidance. She emphasized that many university resources remain available to help students, even as the market shifts.

“I think the job market feels scary right now for a lot of people in Maryland,” she said. “Most of us know people who have lost a job.”

Ryan added that large tech companies cutting positions has contributed to anxiety about the market. Still, Ryan said the Career Center’s goal is to help students maintain hope and confidence by hosting similar events throughout the year.

“There are still opportunities,” she said. “The jobs still exist.”

The College Park Aviation Museum, which opened in 1998, sits beside the world’s oldest continuously operating airport. Its newest exhibit about Columbia Air Center, the nation’s first licensed Black-owned and operated airport, opened to the public on Oct. 10.

Located in Croom, Maryland, Columbia Air Center operated from 1940 to 1962 with a two year break during World War II, according to signage at the exhibit.

To tell the stories of the aviators who flew there, the exhibit features interactive video displays, historical documents from the airfield and even a choose-your-own-adventure game about earning a pilot’s license.

A gas pump — one of the only remaining items from the airfield — sits encased in glass near a projector that plays historical footage.

Ashley Harman, an audiology doctoral student at the University of Maryland, said she discovered the museum three years ago. She has since become a regular visitor, going four or five times this summer alone.

“It’s an excellent escape,” Harman said. “I feel like I’m always finding something new in there.”

[UMD students name asteroid ‘Diamondback’ after completing research for astronomy class]

Harman attended an Oct. 9 opening event for the Columbia Air Center exhibit, where she said individuals involved with the airfield’s history, including descendants of aviators who flew there, gave speeches about its legacy.

John Greene, an aviator who co-owned and helped manage Columbia Air Center, meticulously preserved photographs and documents from his time there. Greene’s collection was passed to the family of Herb Jones Jr., another aviator who co-owned the airfield, after his death.

Many of the museum’s exhibits are pieced together using artifacts gifted by historical figures or their families, according to Luke Perez, curator of the museum’s collections.

The Jones family loaned the museum more than 500 objects in 2021, forming the foundation of the exhibit that Perez said he developed for about four years.

“This story is not recognized. It’s largely unknown,” museum director Nadine Boksmati said. “So we’re proud to be able to share, and this is what we’re here for — local history.”

The museum is part of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission and doesn’t rely on federal funding.

This allows it to continue highlighting local aviation history despite the ongoing government shutdown and efforts by the federal government to end diversity programs in federal institutions.

[3 UMD grants among $7.5B in Department of Energy cuts nationwide]

Despite the recent changes in federal policy, the museum’s staff has had a renewed interest in advertising the museum and its upcoming exhibits.

The museum hires students from this university as part-time educators and has partnered with various university departments, including the business school, according to Boksmati.

Perez said he hopes to have more school trips hosted at the museum.

The museum’s limited visibility partly stems from being under the Prince George’s County parks and recreation department’s marketing organization, according to Perez. He said this means they can’t always promote themselves as directly as they would like.

The museum has additional exhibits planned for 2026, including a display on the first successful vertical flight, which Perez said the museum plans to open in February.

For Harman, who bought a yearly museum membership, it provides a place to disconnect from campus stress. With a plane simulator, dress-up costumes and interactive exhibits, she often takes her younger family members with her when she visits.

Harman once also brought her grandfather, who has dementia and flew in the Navy. She said he was totally himself again while at the museum.

“He was telling me stories about his time in the Navy. He was pointing out the planes,” Harman said. “And I was like, ‘This is really special.’”

But one thing separates “Spot” from other trained service animals on campus: It’s a talking, AI-powered robot.

At a demonstration hosted at the E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory on Thursday, the robotic dog approached the mannequin and used its speaker to say, “I’m here to help. Can you tell me what happened?”

Spot is designed to use its cameras and sensors to help people in mass casualty incidents, said Derek Paley, a professor of aerospace engineering who leads the university’s team.

The technology was one of the dozens of AI projects showcased at the “AI for Public Good” event at this university on Thursday. Research teams gathered in multiple buildings for the event, which brought together students and faculty from seven departments.

“What we’re trying to highlight here is the breadth of ways that AI can be used,” said Hal Daumé, director of the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland.

[UMD president Darryll Pines discusses federal pressure in State of the Campus address]

At the Brendan Iribe Center, another team showcased their AI project focused on helping people with disabilities.

Assistant information professor Stephanie Valencia demonstrated the team’s AI-assisted tools designed to help people with aphasia, a language disorder typically caused by stroke.

During the presentation, Valencia described a joke-telling application, which listens to ongoing conversations with a microphone and uses a language model to suggest relevant jokes.

Unlike other accessibility solutions that require several minutes of effort to communicate one sentence, the team’s application automates the process and minimizes the typing needed to tell a joke, she said.

Valencia added her team hopes to eventually develop smaller models that can run locally on devices.

AI models that currently power apps like ChatGPT are run from datacenters, requiring users to send their personal information off-device, which risks user privacy, Valencia said.

[DOGE website says it cut nearly $15M from UMD grants]

Other teams at the event expressed that running AI models locally comes with the added benefit of being cheaper and better for the environment since they would not require a datacenter. Still, many teams said that packing a lot of computing power into a small device can be challenging.

Daumé, a computer science professor who has been working with artificial intelligence for more than 25 years, said the tech industry has little incentive to change course.

“Right now in the industry sector, there’s not a lot of pressure to make [models] small,” Daumé said. “Yes, it would help with environmental impacts, but I’m not convinced that they really care.”

Levi Burner, a computer science postdoctoral student who was presenting robotics research at the event, echoed Daumé’s sentiments. He said the industry’s push in the opposite direction, toward ever-larger models, may be reaching its limits.

“If you look at what OpenAI and Google are doing with these things, they’re spinning up nuclear reactors and warehouses of graphics cards,” he said. “They want to scale it up and up and up, and they’re going to hit the ceiling.”

Burner’s team demonstrated a flapping-wing drone modeled after hummingbirds, equipped with AI-stabilized cameras to make it ready to fly in real-world applications.

The team’s biology-inspired approach was partly driven by practical constraints, including the need to run artificial intelligence models that work on small devices.

Daumé remains optimistic about the university’s role in shaping the future of artificial intelligence research.

He argued if researchers can make AI models run on less powerful devices, it could make them cheaper to run, more accessible and less damaging to the environment.

“Solving that would also have a lot of knock-on consequences that would be good for the world, frankly,” he said.

Senior economics major Zahra Schenck needed a science credit that wouldn’t tank her GPA.

With graduation looming, she was in search of a natural science lab that would fulfill her last requirements — but spare her from chemistry or physics, she said.

She stumbled upon astronomy principal lecturer Melissa Hayes-Gehrke’s astronomy course and enrolled in it last spring.

“I just thought, ‘Okay, planets are cool,’” Schenck said. “I didn’t fully know what I was getting into.” 

By the end of that semester, she and 11 other students published scientific findings about the physical properties of an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, which they later named “Diamondback.”

Students in Hayes-Gehrke’s class observe an asteroid and publish research in the scientific journal Minor Planet Bulletin. “There are very few university courses in the world that offer this opportunity,” the class syllabus reads.

[UMD STEM students worry about impact of AI, federal workforce cuts on job market]

Hayes-Gehrke said the opportunity to publish research is exactly what sets the class apart.

“Students love that they’re actually doing something new,” she said. “Usually in classes, you feel like there’s busy work, and you get to some result, but you feel like the result was already predetermined.”

The opportunity proved invaluable for students such as CC Lizas, who was on Schenck’s team.

“I didn’t do other science stuff at all,” the senior philosophy, politics and economics major said.  “I just was so excited to have the chance to do this.”

Schenck, Lizas and their team members remotely controlled a telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia to track the asteroid. They took images of the asteroid using online software and recorded its brightness over time to track its movement in the solar system.

Schenck and her teammates completed their research last spring despite technical problems and weather-related setbacks. Their findings were published in the Minor Planet Bulletin in late September, according to a computer, mathematical and natural sciences college news release.

[3 UMD grants among $7.5B in Department of Energy cuts nationwide]

Schenck and Lizas both said their biggest takeaways came from working together.

Hayes-Gehrke mixed students into teams with different majors, including philosophy, computer science, economics and government. This allowed them to lean on each other’s strengths, Lizas said.

“The whole class is a group project,” Lizas said. “We were all learning so much from each other because we did have these different backgrounds.”

According to Lizas, the diverse makeup of teams was intentional. Teams were carefully constructed based on surveys to ensure diverse expertise, she said.

Hayes-Gehrke said she designed the class around collaboration. The amount of data students collect throughout the asteroid-tracking process would be overwhelming to sift through individually, she said.

The teams faced one more decision after completing their observations: what to officially name their asteroid that previously carried the temporary name “2000 OS51.”

[UMD TerpAI updates aim to boost campus adoption]

Following the precedent of another team in Hayes-Gehrke’s previous classes that named an asteroid “Testudo” in 2024, the team wanted another university-related name, Schenck said.

Schenck said her team chose “Diamondback” because they believed many students at the university would connect with it.

For Schenck, now a finance graduate student at this university, the teamwork skills she gained while tracking the “Diamondback” asteroid were immediately applicable.

“You need to be able to communicate and also collaborate within your own team to get stuff done,” she said. “Those sorts of lessons were more important to me.”

Lizas, who is studying abroad in Copenhagen this semester, said a class she thought would simply help fulfill her science requirement ended up exceeding expectations.

“It was the perfect class,” she said. “It really was.”

Advancements in artificial intelligence, tech industry layoffs and federal workforce cuts have created new uncertainties for science, technology, engineering and math majors, who now face increased competition and fewer entry-level jobs than previous graduating classes.

Rishi Gullipalli, a junior computer science and immersive media design major, has noticed the shift firsthand.

“It’s definitely gotten more competitive now,” Gullipalli said.

To stand out among a sea of other applicants, he’s focused on developing what he calls an “it factor” — skills that go beyond basic programming.

“What people want now is that ‘it factor,’ right? Are you good with AI? Are you a design person?” he said. “You don’t want just computer science today, you want computer science plus something else.”

That “something else” has become viewed as essential, as AI is reshaping the very jobs many students are preparing for.

[UMD students protest defense contractors attending STEM career fair]

According to a Stanford University study published in August, the increased adoption of AI has impacted the availability of entry-level jobs. Young workers aged 22-25 in AI-heavy fields, such as software development and customer service, have seen employment drop as much as 13 percent since AI went mainstream.

Aidan Melvin, who graduated from this university last spring, has seen this dynamic play out in his new role as a software engineer at Google.

“Employees using whatever internal AI tools they have, it makes each engineer a little bit more productive,” he said.

As current engineers are able to use AI to take on more work, companies can put off hiring entry-level employees, Melvin explained.

The decrease in entry-level jobs comes as enrollment in STEM fields at this university has surged. Between 2022 and 2024, the computer, mathematical and natural sciences college alone grew by more than 1,100 students, a 17.6 percent jump, while the engineering school added another 212 students, according to the institutional research, planning and assessment office.

The result, it seems, is that more graduates are competing for fewer job openings.

“I wish it was easier. I wish there were more openings. I wish there was less competition,” Jacob Zipp, a sophomore chemical engineering major, said.

Like many students at this university, Zipp attended the STEM career fair hoping to explore opportunities and network with potential employers. While not yet looking for full-time work, Zipp isn’t alone in starting the job hunt early.

“I think it really takes the first internship to just get the ball rolling,” said Camila Sanchez, a freshman aerospace engineering major who networked at the STEM career fair despite being years away from graduation.

For seniors, such as information science major Silvia Quinonez, an even tighter timeline can mean compromising on career goals to land any position.

[UMD students lose internship, job opportunities after federal hiring freeze]

“I’m willing to work for anything at this point,” Quinonez said.

Rather than competing for jobs at major tech companies, many students like Quinonez are now casting wider nets by considering smaller startups and even non-tech companies that need technical expertise.

Still, for those who land their dream jobs, the threat of layoffs looms. In 2024 alone, more than 150,000 tech industry workers lost their jobs, with another 89,000 cut so far in 2025, according to layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi.

Melvin, the software engineer at Google, said mass layoffs are contributing to an atmosphere of uncertainty within the tech industry.

“There’s definitely a worry about that,” he said. “Sometimes people just get laid off randomly, and it’s hard to predict.”

The uncertainty extends beyond private sector tech jobs too.

Maria Herd, an assistant director of communications at this university’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, said she has observed a domino effect caused by federal workforce cuts.

“Because of the federal cuts, now the state of Maryland is having less tax income because so many Marylanders are federal workers,” Herd said. “That means the state budget has less money, so that means we’re getting cuts.”

This domino effect has created what Herd described as a “hellscape” in the Washington, D.C. area job market, where even government positions — traditionally seen as stable career paths — have become increasingly scarce.

As of September, more than 178,000 federal workers have been fired or taken leave options, according to Layoffs.fyi.

Despite the challenges, people at this university are remaining positive about the opportunities for students.

According to Alegna Threet, a special events coordinator for this university’s computer science department, the computer science career fair last week saw nearly 2,000 students meet with 61 employers. While the fair has been smaller in recent years, she said, the turnout shows continued student interest.

“Students are very optimistic about the jobs they do see,” Threet said. “They just see less of them.”

The updates, set to launch by the end of September, are meant to broaden the chatbot’s appeal while providing equal access to AI for all students, said Axel Persaud, assistant vice president within the Division of Information Technology.

As part of the new updates, DIT plans to add access to more than 11,000 AI models to TerpAI, including the newly released GPT-5, Persaud said. TerpAI users can currently chat with OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, which was released in 2024.

To help users pick the right model, eventually the platform will sort the models into categories, such as creative writing or general purpose, Persaud said. The categorization will make the chatbot easier for students to use, he added.

As of September, at least 3,600 students, or 9 percent of the student body, have used TerpAI. Many university faculty and staff members have used the chatbot as well.

“We want to make sure everyone has some base-level of access to generative AI technology,” Persaud said.

[New Microsoft center at UMD continues effort to increase statewide quantum research]

While AI services such as ChatGPT offer limited free use, certain features sometimes require a paid monthly subscription.

For some students, such as sophomore computer engineering major Jason Lima, a university-sponsored chatbot that surpasses those limits sounds valuable.

“It’s $20 a month, which is kind of expensive, but it might be worth it,” Lima said, referencing ChatGPT’s plus subscription. “A free version for university students, that’d be really nice, more convenient.”

Beyond its major updates, some faculty members are finding creative uses of TerpAI.

Jim Purtilo, an associate professor of computer science, worked with DIT in the spring to develop specialized AI chatbots for his software engineering students using TerpAI.

In Purtilo’s capstone class, students work on semester-long projects with real customers, including businesses and organizations that need software.

Purtilo hopes students can use his chatbots to practice mock interviews with customers, where the chatbot takes on the role of someone in need of a software solution. Students can refine their critical thinking skills with the activity, he said.

While working with TerpAI, Purtilo said he encountered some technical limitations with the platform. In one instance, an AI chatbot he tried creating for his class failed to work properly on TerpAI’s platform, forcing him to use ChatGPT instead.

Despite this setback, Purtilo said he plans to test his new chatbots with students for the first time this fall.

[UMD students awarded $250,000 for school shooting detection AI tool]

Even with TerpAI’s planned improvements and widespread faculty adoption, students’ awareness and perception of TerpAI remains mixed. For some students, overarching concerns about AI outweigh any potential benefits.

“I hate AI. I actually really despise it,” said Madison Van Dyke, a senior government and politics major. “The environmental consequences just outweigh any of the benefits.”

Others, such as senior economics major Nicolas Recio are open to using AI for certain tasks but question whether it should be a university priority.

“I’m fine with it being used as a learning tool, on the premise that it will even the playing field because it’s a great resource,” Recio said. “The school’s resources could go to a lot more important things.”

Education college dean Kimberly Griffin announced the winner during a summit at Amazon’s second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, after the conclusion of an 18-month competition focused on school safety.

The winning team, DefenX, beat fellow University of Maryland finalist Weapon Watch in the competition hosted by xFoundry, a startup incubator founded by this university in 2023. As members of DefenX took the stage, they were visibly emotional.

“We all have been a part of the American education system … and we don’t want any student, staff member or teacher feeling the fears that we felt,” said DefenX team member Srinidhi Gubba, a junior computer science and individual studies double major.

[Maryland Corps welcomes nearly 600 inductees at UMD Xfinity Center]

Gubba said she knows the anxiety that the threat of gun violence in schools can cause. If the team’s work helps even one person, they’d be happy with the results, she said.

During the competition, teams were judged on criteria such as the speed, accuracy and cost-effectiveness of their AI detection software, according to Phillip Alvarez, head of products and ventures at xFoundry.

“Most market leaders in the school safety space are adapted from stadiums and from airports,” Alvarez said. “They’re pretty good quality-wise, but very expensive.”

Using DefenX’s software, schools can use their existing security cameras to detect potential threats, according to Nithin Skantha, an applied machine learning graduate student.

Once set up, the program uses image recognition to identify when someone is holding a weapon, Skantha said.

After the technology detects a weapon, it tracks the person carrying the weapon throughout the school, Skantha said.

“Even if [a shooter] goes in the frame of different cameras, they go into blind spots, we track them as soon as they appear back in a different camera,” Skantha said. “That’s the specialty that we have.”

The event comes after multiple shootings at school campuses this week.

A shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado left the teenage shooter dead and two other students critically injured. That same day, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot during a campus event at Utah Valley University.

[U.S. Naval Academy, Maryland General Assembly leaders receive false threats]

Through the team’s work, DefenX hopes to quicken emergency responses to similar incidents.

DefenX plans to use the $250,000 award to scale its technology by getting stronger processors and starting real-world testing, according to Smithi Mahendran, a junior computer science major.

“We’re going to prioritize trying to get our name across the school industry, trying to deploy our product or even do some pilot tests,” she said.

In the future, team members hope to expand their software so it can be used for multiple applications.

Ian Njenga, who graduated in 2025 after studying accounting and finance, said though the project is currently focused on gun violence, that’s not the only type of incident the technology could be used for.

“Students fight, students fall, students get sick,” Njenga said. “And so we’re thinking about training multiple models that can work for all these kinds of scenarios, and help us become a much better multimodal solution for schools.”