Charged by the Executive Director of Digital Spaces. Joe Way, UCLA’s AV/IT Solutions Team, was tasked with reimagining how technology could drive the university’s Five-Year Focus on digital transformation, innovation, and global readiness for events such as the 2028 Los Angeles. Rising to the challenge, Chi led a rockstar team of engineers, architects, and project coordinators to design a next-generation cloud-first AV platform. This vision shifts audiovisual systems from isolated, siloed models to an agile, enterprise-scale service model.

This new platform embodies the philosophy “Smart = Zero, Zero = Everything,” where zero hardware, zero latency, and zero touch create the foundation for an innovative, sustainable, and scalable campus. By integrating cloud control, real-time monitoring, and data analytics, the team unified classrooms, digital signage, research spaces, and event infrastructure into a single, resilient AV ecosystem. The result is an operational model that not only simplifies system management but also enhances user experience, accessibility, and data-driven decision-making across the UCLA environment.

More than a technology project, UCLA’s AV-as-a-Platform (AVaaP) initiative represents a cultural and architectural shift. It demonstrates how cloud innovation, platform thinking, and collaborative leadership can transform AV/IT operations into a connected digital backbone for education, research, and community engagement. Attendees will see how strategic design, cross-departmental collaboration, and cloud integration have come together to build a more innovative, adaptive campus — one that connects everything, everywhere, and everyone.