Preparing Young Minds for an AI-Powered Future
AI Scholars, an in-person and live online AI education program by graduate students from Stanford University.
Why is AI education important?
Over the past few decades, the world has become increasingly interconnected. With infinite information at our fingertips, the digital revolution has changed the ways we communicate, educate, live, and do business. Now, a new technological revolution is on the rise: artificial intelligence, or AI.
While AI is nowhere near having the broad intelligence and context-adjusting abilities that human beings possess, the diversity of its applications is astounding. For example, Alexa and Siri are virtual assistants that we interact with every day, empowering us to be more productive. Self-driving cars are reminiscent of science-fiction, using artificial intelligence to drive us towards a transportation revolution. Netflix, Spotify, Google, Amazon and countless other services we love are foundationally driven by this very technology.
Students work on socially oriented AI projects, such as using computer vision to automate plant disease detection
In addition to these well known applications, AI can also be useful in lesser known but very powerful ways — as a force for good. Across critical sectors such as healthcare, journalism, agriculture that impact all of us greatly, AI can drive significant positive impact. From helping doctors to more easily identify diseases and thus treat many more patients, to detecting and preventing the spread of fake news and helping farmers detect plant infestations, the possibilities of AI for good are only limited by our imagination.
Although today’s students are poised to be the drivers of this revolution, AI remains inaccessible to most. Given its widespread effects, AI innovation should involve not only the computer scientists designing algorithms but also policymakers regulating this emerging field and users affected by the technology. To this end, it’s essential to introduce students to AI early on and give them the tools to navigate its complex ethical implications. Through education, they can advance these technologies in an effective and responsible way. It is also key to empower students from diverse backgrounds and fields to participate in AI — the design, production, and deployment of AI should be led by people who reflect the diversity of our changing world, including the young people who will be most affected by these technologies.
For current high school students, consider self-guided research projects to explore AI and see whether it piques your interest, or summer programs like Inspirit AI to pursue this exploration in a more guided environment. In college, AI is a developing field that students can study in a range of different majors. For example, you can consider majoring in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or even Information Sciences to start research on the cutting edge of these developments. Beyond college, knowledge and passion for AI will set you up for a rapidly-expanding career market as well.
Inspirit AI Scholars
Inspirit AI Scholars is a pre-college summer enrichment program that exposes high school students to AI through experiential learning and a mentor-guided project. The program is developed and taught by Stanford PhD and Masters students that apply AI to a variety of different domains from neuroscience, to regenerative medicine. The program runs online and across the globe, in the UAE, India, and major American cities.
In the first half, students will learn about cutting-edge AI technologies including Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, and Recommendation Engines as well as some of their modern applications like speech recognition, machine translation, automated medical imaging, and autonomous vehicles. Students will code mini-projects using Python to get a glimpse into how such innovations are created.
The second half will involve a deeper dive into a project. Guided by our instructors, students will work in small teams to create a socially impactful AI project from a domain of their interest such as healthcare, agriculture, transportation, or disaster-relief. See examples from our past programs here! The 10-session camp will culminate in a presentation of the project findings to parents and guests, and students will receive guidance on how to continue to pursue AI in college and beyond.
Live Online
Creating an enriching learning experience in the digital context
Our Live Online program offers a new way for students to learn AI online through live video classes. With a 4:1 student-teacher ratio, students receive personalized instruction and learn and apply AI to a socially impactful project in a field of their interest such as healthcare, sustainability, and robotics, just like in our in-person programs.
We believe education is undergoing a digital transformation that is here to stay, and we’re excited to be deploying innovative educational technology tools to deliver a uniquely enriching, flexible, and targeted learning experience to students.
This requires us to be thoughtful about the approach to teaching online. For example, in our Live Online classes, instructors divide students into virtual breakout rooms to allow for personalized coding support and discussion. Students are encouraged to raise their hand virtually to ask a question, participate in polls and engage in other forms of interaction with their peers and instructor. The in-class teaching is supplemented by an online portal for students to review and continue learning the materials on their own time. By using such approaches, we hope to best leverage the benefits of learning in an online context and also provide a rich social experience for the students, similar to what they might experience in-person.
Teaching Team
The teaching team consists of 25+ PhD and Masters students from Stanford applying artificial intelligence to a variety of domains such as healthcare, neuroscience, bioinformatics, transportation and more! They come from over 5 countries and are thrilled about the opportunity to work closely with passionate high school students.
Artem Trotsyuk, who has taught at Inspirit programs in Delhi and Dubai, is a PhD student in Bioengineering working on designing and developing AI-powered smart bandages with a closed-loop system for personalized medicine. He has taught many machine learning courses in the Bay and loves to combine his passions for machine learning, healthcare, and biology to create an enriching classroom experience!
“I found it extremely rewarding to work with bright, motivated and excited young adults. Seeing them learn the concepts and then implementing them in projects was the most rewarding experience. These students are our future, and with the power of machine learning, they will move our future in a positive direction.”
Students
While the teachers have been integral to building and growing the AI Scholars program, it is the student energy and dedication that makes the experience truly meaningful. Students from a diverse set of backgrounds have taken part in the program, some of who are expert machine learning programmers looking to work closely with the instructors, while others had barely written any code before the program.
Ananya Grover, who took part at Summer 2019, Delhi
“The Inspirit AI summer program helped me grasp fundamental AI concepts in a surprisingly short amount of time. In addition to coding, I broadened my perspective dwelling on ethical questions and learning about AI applications directly from people working on them. At the intersection of my passions for tech and journalism, I got to work on a fake news detection AI model and present it with my team!”
Join Inspirit AI!
Inspirit AI is launching a Live Online program and coming to Palo Alto, San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Chicago, and also to India, Dubai and other locations globally! Apply for an Inspirit AI program online or for any one of our locations by June 30th. If you have any questions, please contact the program manager Katherine Gjertsen at kgjert@stanford.edu.
