Preparing India’s Bright Young Minds for the AI Era

“AI is arguably the most important technology humanity has ever worked on.”

— Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google

Over the past few decades, the world has become more interconnected than ever. With infinite information at our fingertips, the digital revolution has changed the ways we communicate, educate, live, and do business. However, a new technological revolution is on the rise: artificial intelligence. The students of today are poised to be the drivers of this revolution and to tackle challenges that humanity has never faced before.

Why AI is important?

While AI is nowhere near having the broad intelligence and context-adjusting abilities that human beings posses, the diversity of applications it powers is no doubt astounding. Alexa and Siri are virtual assistants that we interact with every day, empowering us to be more productive — or at least they try to, when they don’t fail us. 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.

From powering satellite imagery analysis to helping farmers predict crop yields months ahead of harvest to addressing the acute shortage of eye doctors through automated diagnosing, AI also has the potential to be life-saving.

Source: New York Times

AI and India

“Make Artificial Intelligence in India, Make Artificial Intelligence Work for India.”

— Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India

A recent noteworthy change proposed by the CBSE Board to the Class IX Syllabus was the addition of Artificial Intelligence as a skill subject option starting this academic year. Hundreds of schools nationwide are rushing to adopt this new course and train teachers to deliver this material.

AI for Crowd Management at the Kumbh Mela, India, the largest gathering of humans on Earth

The Maharashtra government recently held the AI for Social Innovation Challenge conference, where startups across the country came up with novel ideas applying AI to solve important social challenges. Moreover, the newly founded Wadhwani AI Institute in Mumbai is focused on fostering collaboration between the government and the best research institutions globally to apply AI to address challenges across healthcare, education, agriculture, and smart cities. Several other states across India are following suit.

Why Inspirit AI?

We started Inspirit AI to inspire students at an early age to understand and apply this powerful technology for good. Our team consists of graduate students, academics, and industry professionals from Stanford University who have years of expertise in AI.

We hope to expose high school students to the workings of this technology through an experiential, project-based curriculum. Motivating students to get excited about AI is perhaps more important than perfecting their skills of designing AI solutions. There is a lot of excitement, some fear, and a significant amount of misinformation.

Our goal is to bring the most recent developments in AI from courses, labs, and ventures at Stanford to empower high school students around the world by separating fact from fiction and giving students a head start in their AI journey.

What is Inspirit AI?

Inspirit AI Scholars is a pre-college summer enrichment program that exposes curious high school students (Grades 9–12) to AI. The program is developed and taught exclusively by Stanford AI specialists who travel to India this summer to teach. Learn more at: www.inspiritai.com

What does the program include?

The program is designed as an experiential and project-based introduction to Artificial Intelligence. In the first week, 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, including 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 week will involve a deeper dive into a project. Students will work in teams of 4 on a mentor-led, socially impactful AI project from a domain such as healthcare, agriculture, transportation, disaster-relief, etc. The 10-day camp will culminate in a presentation of the project findings to parents and guests, and students will receive guidance on how to continue on in their AI journey.

We hope to make this a phenomenal learning experience for the students and cannot wait for the summer.