DAY 2

Digital project director and international speaker Leanne Page kicked off day two with a talk on ‘Scrum and Product Management’.

Leanne began her talk by describing a scrum, a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. She highlighted that one key aspect of Scrum, which is vital, is the art of communication. Everyone is part of a team, and everyone has their own roles which are all equally important in the adhesion of a successful team. One part of the whole piece that is a team, is the product owner, who is in charge of the vision. Most importantly, the team must stick together.

A daily scrum is a 50 minute stand-up, led by the scrum master, in which the team asks themselves: what did we do yesterday? What will we do today? The next section in the sprint is the sprint review, where the team then asks themselves: will we take this product to market? Will we produce enough revenue? Finally, there is the retrospective. This is the section where the team discusses: how the team is doing, the process, how they are working as a team, what they are producing and its value.

Hannah from Unruly then added a few words. She explained that there are never a shortage of good ideas, but the problem arises when there are a shortage of resources, so the main question becomes, what can you do about that?. A key term to remember is MVP, or minimum viable product. In short, the product must be feasible and viable. To make this notion easier to understand, Hannah provided the example of thinking, ‘how will I get from point A to point B?’. One option could be to build a bus. This, however, would take a lot of time, money, and effort that could be better spent elsewhere. In essence, if you have an idea but it’s not feasible nor viable, though it may be the easiest or most comfortable, it is not an MVP. The MVP of this scenario is to make a skateboard. This option is easily achievable, easy and cheap to make. It may not be perfect, but its iterative value [is high].

Before returning to design thinking and working on individual projects with the help of the BBC mentors, the BBC Blue Room team discussed ‘deepfakes’ — where a person’s face and voice are transposed and used in a totally different context- and the impact they will have on the world.

That afternoon, the teens were lucky enough to have a talk by John Havensvia Google Hangouts from New York. As Head of Ethics at IEEE, he was able to provide a unique perspective on the ethics of autonomous and intelligent systems, and the future AI is heading in. The subjects he discussed were: addiction to screens, common feelings toward AI, the code of ethics, standards, affective computing, and data. He took questions from our teens and had a lively discussion about all the different aspects of AI and AI Ethics.

The final talks of the day were given by Alejandro Saucedoon Ethics and AI, and Bettina Hermantfrom the BBC on her Data Science journey. Alejandro, chairman of the Institute of Ethical AI and Machine Learning and advisor of Teens In AI, spoke to the teens about: machine learning, deep networks, the potential of AI, ‘where is the limit?’, ethics, accuracy, transparency of data and metadata collection, backwards comparability and versioning, and identifying cyber security threats.

Bettina inspired the teens about her journey to becoming a data scientist. She told them all about how data is used to create a personalised experience.

Originally published at Acorn Aspirations.