High Schoolers Lead the Way with AI Research

Mentees work with mentor, Angela Sy, during an AI Research Project Fellowship meeting

Last month, we wrapped up the inaugural AI4ALL AI Research Project Fellowship, a 3-month program that paired 14 high school-age alumni of AI4ALL summer programs with professionals working in AI. The students and mentors collaborated in small groups on 10 AI research projects, taking the projects from idea to reality — learning about everything from neural nets to GitHub along the way. Some of the projects included using natural language processing to rank ambulance calls by urgency, using reinforcement learning to create a personalized math curriculum, and using computer vision to detect wildfires before they spread.

Mentors came from companies like IBM, Pandora, OpenAI, Ford, Skycatch, Roche, and ImpactAI. Mentees were in 10th-12th grade and were all alumni of AI4ALL’s Stanford and UC Berkeley programs. Over the course of the program, the groups worked together to define and scope their project, learn the tools and technologies needed to achieve their project goals, and collaborate in person and on Slack to bring their projects to life.

Projects

Explore a few of the projects that resulted from the research fellowship program below.

• Prioritizing emergency dispatch calls with NLP: post
• Detecting toxic language with natural language processing: post
• Enhancing eye disease diagnosis with computer vision: post 1, post 2

Community celebration

The final celebration was a huge success. We welcomed over 50 mentors, mentees, parents, professors, partners, and supporters to UC Berkeley, where we heard from each group about their project, were welcomed by AI4ALL co-founder Dr. Fei-Fei Li, presented certificates of completion, and celebrated the success and huge amount of work and learning done by the students over the course of the program. Students responded unanimously that they now feel confident enough to tackle their own AI projects, one student sharing: “This program inspired me about my own ability. I wouldn’t have believed I could do this.”

L-R: Student receives his certificate of completion; Dr Fei-Fei Li welcomes the audience at the celebration; student presents her work.

Get involved

Interested in participating as a mentor in the next iteration of this program? Sign up here to get notified about this and other volunteer opportunities.