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Technical.ly
3 days ago
- Business
- Technical.ly
Baltimore will keep CIAA tournament through 2029, officials announce
An annual basketball tournament held during Black History Month and bringing a wide economic footprint will stay in Baltimore through the end of the decade, local officials announced. Public and private sector leaders on Wednesday gathered at the Baltimore Visitor Center in the Inner Harbor to announce the city won the bid to host the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) competition from 2027 to 2029. Baltimore has hosted the popular HBCU tournament since 2022, a start date that was delayed a year by the pandemic. Competition is intense to host the event, which features games between historically Black colleges and universities throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southern United States. With this latest win, Baltimore notably beat out Charlotte, North Carolina, which hosted the CIAA between 2006 and 2020. At the announcement, many speakers — including leaders from CIAA members Bowie State University and Lincoln University, Baltimore-based sports apparel giant Under Armour, Maryland's Department of Commerce, tourism arm Visit Baltimore and insurance company CareFirst — highlighted the tournament's impact and significance beyond the court. 'My favorite part of this relationship is the deep investment into community,' said Mayor Brandon Scott. 'The CIAA goes all out: financial literacy, health summits, skills camps … so that we're growing the generation of CIAA graduates to come back to Baltimore and go into communities to help make us the best version of ourselves.' This impact extends to the city's business and startup communities, which each earned a major spotlight during prior tournaments. In 2024, the city saw a total economic impact of $32.5 million, including $23.6 million in direct spending, according to Visit Baltimore. Al Hutchinson, the tourism agency's outgoing CEO (whom Mayor Scott recognized at the end of the Wednesday press conference), previously said that the tournament generated $81.7 million in total economic impact and funded an average of 1,326 jobs each year between 2022 and 2024. The 2025 financial figures dropped a little, with this year's tournament boasting $19.8 million in direct spending and $27.4 million in total economic impact. That said, the number of jobs created, by Visit Baltimore's tally, grew to 1,487. For the innovation community, the tournament offered the chance to showcase Baltimore's Black technologists, entrepreneurs and other sector players during the annual Tech Summit House program. The series of talks and pitch contests revolving around topics like AI, Africa's startup world and how to navigate an industry filled with racist disparities dovetailed with local boosters' broader goal of highlighting this predominantly Black city's unique assets. 'The tournament particularly uplifts Black-owned businesses, highlights our HBCU legacy,' Hutchinson previously told 'and adds to the vibrant mix of music, arts and culture that define Baltimore's Black community.' Although he didn't speak during Wednesday's presser, Mark Anthony Thomas, CEO and president of the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC), said he took part in a pitch to host the tournament last week. He and others only found out about the acceptance this week. For Thomas, the fact that none of Baltimore's HBCUs are in the CIAA (the closest being Bowie State in Prince George's County, near DC) was actually an asset. 'The most successful ends are when you don't have the natural advantages of other markets,' Thomas told before the press conference. 'We don't have any of the CIAA schools, we're not central to where they're located. And it means that Baltimore overperforms on charm, our ability to be collaborative and a great partner with the CIAA — and we actually put on a good show.' Just a day earlier, Thomas held a fireside chat at the GBC's Inner Harbor offices with Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the New York City-based Center for an Urban Future. For nearly an hour, the pair spoke before GBC members about topics including the growth of New York's tech economy, the Great Recession's lessons in economic diversification and what Baltimore can learn from the country's biggest city. One theme Bowles hit on was the importance of the cultural sector to a city's development. Thomas connected this to the current bid, and the way Baltimore's economy can build upon the prior tournaments. 'In our 10-year plan, creative and culture is one of the three opportunity areas, so this is central to that type of potential we see for the region,' he said. 'Obviously, it's a risk. Visit Baltimore initially pursued this, and so you think about the risk they took — to even believe that Baltimore had a chance at competing for this — and for it to have been successful, now twice, is a huge endorsement of the infrastructure they built.' community Slack and visiting the #baltimore channel.
Technical.ly
27-03-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
Key takeaways from CIAA's Tech Summit House: AI, cyber, Black innovation and more
At a time when diversity, equity and inclusion principles are getting dismantled throughout the country, Maryland's biggest city made a basketball tournament an opportunity to showcase Black excellence to the country — including in its tech scene. This year's Tech Summit House took place toward the end of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association's (CIAA) annual contest last month. The historic conference represents historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) across the East Coast. The CIAA's decision for Baltimore — which has two HBCUs, but no schools in the conference — to host this tournament through 2026 is part of a multi-year agreement that recognizes the city as a hub for Black excellence. While it is foremost about basketball, it goes beyond to showcase Black leadership across different sectors. The Tech Summit House, which this year hosted a mix of innovation-focused programs at the Inner Harbor's Rita Rossi Colwell Center, embodies this concept. 'It is the only tournament that does more than sports,' said Paul Plymouth, director of state government affairs and local engagement for Tech Summit House title sponsor Verizon's Maryland operations. 'It also prioritizes community building, education and innovation.' This year's event featured conversations chock full of lessons about AI, cybersecurity preparedness, youth entrepreneurship, social media and the African diaspora. Here are just a few of them. AI is the next gold rush, but who's mining the wealth? Aaron Dante, host of the 'No Pix After Dark' podcast and 2024 Creator of the Year, recorded a live episode with guest Amen-Ra Mashariki, AI and data strategies director at Bezos Earth Fund. They explored the rapid expansion of AI and the economic opportunity for the Black community. Mashariki drew on history in words of caution about who benefits from this expansion. 'AI is the modern gold rush,' Mashariki said. 'But remember who profited the most in the gold rush — it wasn't the miners. It was the companies selling the picks and shovels.' He contrasted the infrastructure giants, or 'hyperscalers,' (OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, etc.) with the 'gold miners' who sift and refine the gold — or companies like Grammarly that build AI apps and sell to consumers. Finally, at the bottom of the supply chain lies the consumer, like a student who wants to check their writing. Mashariki stressed the importance of developing AI rather than just using it. 'As a community writ large, we're on the bottom of that supply chain,' Mashariki said to the room. 'We need to flip that paradigm and actually start playing a role.' Without Black innovators building AI businesses, the technology will continue to be controlled by a select few, leaving Black communities at a wealth disadvantage — and will likely lead to further algorithmic biases, he said. Constraints breed creativity: Lessons from DeepSeek for HBCUs Mashariki shared another mental model he hoped listeners would take away: how constraints can breed creativity. Earlier this year, the DeepSeek event rattled markets after the Chinese AI company claimed to have produced a more powerful and cost-effective model than household names like OpenAI. This initially shocked markets because it came as a surprise — due to US export controls, Nvidia was selling China less powerful chips than what was available to US companies. Mashariki compared this domestic reaction to the ways that Black people got frozen out of the US economy throughout history — and can organize in the face of these structures. 'This was, euphemistically, the US government looking to put their foot on the neck of China to keep them from gaining AI supremacy,' he said, adding: 'Think about the Black community and how the government, whether it has been local, state or federal entities, have made decisions and policies that have kept the foot on the neck of African Americans throughout history. 'China is in a position where they get garbage technology,' he went on. 'So what did the DeepSeek team do? They literally had to hotwire the cheap technology we sold them to make it even better, faster, and more capable and cheaper to use than what we were doing here.' 'If a small team out of China with inferior technology can change the world, how come we can't get Coppin, Morgan, Bowie, Lincoln [and other HBCUs] together and do the same thing?' he continued to applause from the crowd. Cybersecurity for every generation Another common theme of the summit was cybersecurity preparedness, on which panelists consistently offered advice. When asked about safeguards around data and AI, Tasha Austin-Williams, a principal at Deloitte and executive director of its AI Institute for Government, suggested strengthening data literacy, disabling voice assistants like Alexa and Siri and using 'AI sandboxes.' These sandboxes 'help us have containers that can create prototypes, and enable us to be experimental while also compliant,' she said. Thomas Byrd, VP and senior cybersecurity manager at T. Rowe Price, emphasized a more human touch. 'Be inquisitive, unplug from electronics and connect in real life,' he advised. 'Be analytical of the world.' He also suggested that different generations can fall victim to different cybersecurity threats — and that we ought to learn and teach one another. On an earlier panel, West Muhammad, a 14-year-old cybersecurity expert and Coppin State University's youngest-ever student, urged teens and adults alike to prioritize cybersecurity basics like using strong passwords with special characters, not answering unknown scam calls and verifying sources before sharing things to bigger audiences. 'Misinformation is one of the strongest ways to bring down an organization,' Muhammad said. $10k for early-stage, Black women-led ventures The Tech Summit House wrapped with cheers as founders Aalliyeh Clinton of 2025 RealLIST Startup Monneah's Engineered Materials and Angel Hobbs of Krave, each earned $5,000 by winning a pitch competition. A sizable crowd stayed around to support and hear from the emerging group of Black founders. Throughout the day, conversations kept coming back to a core message: Novel technologies and ventures can either widen the existing digital divide or offer powerful tools to close the racial wealth gap. The difference comes down to who is at the table building these technologies, and for whom. Check out some more photos to see who showed up to CIAA's table: The CIAA tournament will be held next year in Baltimore as well, returning for the sixth consecutive year, but the bidding for the 2027 tournament is currently open.
