Purdue ECE faculty take top honors in Purdue's Thinky Competition
Faculty from Purdue's Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) took home two of the four awards in this summer's Thinky Competition, a College of Engineering initiative organized by Stanley Chan, director of Engineering AI Education and an ECE professor, that challenged faculty to build web apps, AI skills, and agents supporting teaching and learning.
James C. Davis, an assistant professor of ECE, earned a gold prize for "Model-Based Agentic Software Engineering: A Textbook and Case Study in DocAble." Davis tackled two problems at once: the absence of a rigorous methodology for the AI-coding-agent era of software engineering, and the labor-intensive burden of remediating course materials under new ADA accessibility requirements. He used the development of DocAble, an automated accessibility remediation system, as a testbed to derive model-based agentic software engineering, a methodology for building trustworthy software with AI agents. The project produced both a deployed web application and a textbook laying out the method.
Amy Reibman, the Elmore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, won a silver prize for "Creating an Interactive Reusable Collection of Probability Problems (ECE 302)." Her project built a toolset, without relying on AI itself, to rapidly assemble problem sets for the course: Python scripts split source files and generate output in LaTeX and HTML, allowing instructors to navigate a problem taxonomy and construct custom sets on demand.
Both winners were honored alongside two colleagues from other units — Morgan Hynes (School of Engineering Education) and Isabel Jimenez (First-Year Engineering) — at the ThinkAI Teaching Fair on Aug. 17.
The competition sits within the college's broader ThinkAI effort, which this summer also included a job-interviewing bootcamp and a workshop series that drew roughly 400 total attendees and more than 200 unique attendees, with recognition of 70 Thinky Faculty Fellows. David Inouye, an ECE assistant professor, served as the competition's evaluation lead.
"The Thinky Competition was an incredible showcase of how Purdue College of Engineering faculty are exploring AI in teaching," Inouye said. "From automated ADA compliance to full course design, this summer challenge revealed that we are all still learning; AI has surprising strengths and weaknesses. We found that success requires two ingredients: the deep domain expertise our world-class faculty already possess, and explicit control over AI, a skill we are actively learning."
Source: Purdue Engineering names four winners of faculty Thinky Competition focused on AI