Using Inspirit AI to Enrich Your Extracurriculars: Our High School Students
Inspirit AI is an excellent enrichment opportunity for middle and high school students! Students learn about new and interesting topics, growth both individually and as a team, and have access to an incredible mentor, making this summer enrichment experience incredibly worthwhile.
Christina Liao first entered the program wanting to know the basics of Artificial Intelligence and what it consisted of. However, she was provided with countless information, resources, and mentoring throughout the course, so much so that her interest in Artificial Intelligence skyrocketed and she became curious about all of the applications of Artificial Intelligence.
“InspiritAI allowed students like me to experience aspects of AI that were not all coding. They provided us with workshops on many topics such as BERT or Reinforcement Learning outside of class time, which I really appreciated. I soon came to an understanding that AI and CS could be applied to basically almost any field or topic I could think of. The possibilities were endless when it came to technology or more specifically AI, and I was fascinated.”
Like most students of the past year, learning online posed its own set of challenges for Christina. However, it also brought some advantages. Working online gave Christina the opportunity to communicate with her peers and instructor who all like the opposite sides of the earth.
“Not only did I have the chance to work with a very talented mentor, I also had the chance to communicate with students who shared my interests, but had completely different experiences from me. The project I worked on was very eye opening for me because I had the chance to see that racial bias not only existed in the human world, but that it also existed in the never ending world of technology. I took great interest in this and it led me to want to dive deeper into the world of AI. With this newfound passion/interest in this field, I wanted to discover more about AI, and I thank InspiritAI for opening a part of me that I didn't know existed.”
Diya Hituvalli had an overall great experience in Inspirit AI. She particularly liked how the program encompassed both lectures as well as the practical applications of Artificial Intelligence.
“Prior to the program, I had little experience in AI, but this program gave me a great foundation, and really sparked my interest in this area. I particularly like how they taught the various methods of AI, and I feel like I left the program equipped with a variety of different knowledge on this topic. With the knowledge and software I have built during the course of the program, I want to go on and develop an app or chrome extension to detect fake news.”
For Vanesh Tibrewal, the time allotted for working on his project was some of his favorite time in the whole program. “It was the perfect blend of individual freedom while also having the safety net of being able to ask our instructor for help in case of any issues.” Vanesh also really enjoyed working in a group of other students because it allowed them to discuss their accuracies and models to identify each others’ strengths and weaknesses. It was through this collaboration that all of their AI models became stronger and better designed.
“The project has certainly helped grow my passion about ML and NLP. It inspired me to continue working on the project after the program ended, which led to me discovering new AI models and honing my passion, while creating a great AI model even more accurate than the one I made during the program. All of this independent exploration would not have been possible with the great resources provided to us during the 'Your AI journey' session, which helped me identify my interests and learn how to find datasets for my own projects and import them into google colab.”
Like Vanesh, Derin Algül also liked working and collaborating with his group. Everyone was able to add their own knowledge and what they had each learned to their presentation, and he loved to look back on the week and see how far he and his fellow students had progressed.
“I also discovered that I enjoyed learning about biology as I read through the blog posts. Our project was a combination of coding, knowledge on biology, and the use of certain AI techniques. We were able to use the coding skills we learned during the first week of the program and by the guidance of our instructor create A Covid-19 model. Another thing that was very interesting was that we viewed many online data libraries and we got to compare the data we were using. Therefore it was very cool to work with real life examples.”
Duriya Rehan found working on her project to be extremely enjoyable and her instructor was very friendly and explained everything very clearly. She found it very exciting to learn about Natural Language Processing in order to classify tweets and build a model that could one day be used to help people.
“We classified tweets into four main categories: medicine, food, water and other, so disaster relief would become easier and less time-consuming. At first, I was unsure that we would be able to complete an entire project and be able to present it in juts 5 days. However, when we started to work on it I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was not the case. Our instructor guided us through every step of the way and explained each line of code comprehensively. The day of the presentations was the highlight of my Inspirit AI experience as I got to showcase the skills I had learnt to my peers and parents.”
Mahima Agrawal also found her project to be very exciting and she especially liked working with her peers and exploring new topics. She found working in small groups to be very enjoyable and even more helpful because there were always different perspectives on how to solve a certain problem and people to help figure out and fix her bugs.
“The specific project I worked on was very entertaining because it applied to people. It was a model that would detect the emotion on a person's face based on the separation of certain points on their face. Learning these different kinds of models as a part of AI and implementing them allowed me to see the behind-the-scenes stuff that happens with facial recognition or seeing a robot move.”
