#GenZHack — Intro To AI
The first day of the #GenZHack took place at Imperial College London, where we held our data science workshop alongside Students4AI. Elena kick started the event by introducing the 40 teens (and parents) to the opening of the Hack and the workshop.
The first speaker was Rohan Virani, a current student at ICL and member of Students4AI, who introduced what AI was and why it’s rapidly growing in popularity in today’s world. He challenged the teens to name various applications of AI based off presented pictures, aiding in describing the vast variety of uses it can have and the profound effect its already having in the tech world. He then concluded by describing the different mediums of data; number, audio, image, video, text and tabular representation.
Next on was Harry Berg who educated the teens on how to construct an AI model, one that takes an input and gives us an output through the use of a neural network. He talked about the use of the loss, and optimiser functions. This was interesting to see the iterative process of an AI and how when giving enough data it can make amazing predictions based on an input.
Students4AI then presented a fun activity for the teens, where they would all take a picture of the sign language alphabet creating a database which they would use to create a database which an AI model will use to try detect the letter shown from a picture. They will present the final model on Saturday or Sunday and could maybe inspire some of the teens to use a similar method to find a solution of one of the challenges proposed. This was fun and I’m keen to see the final product of the model.
The workshop continued into describing the various aspects of the construction of AI from data preparation to the training of the model. Then came a moving talk from Harry who delved into the deploying of AI solutions into the real world and how we, the teens, can use our skills at such an early age to solve our everyday problems, he insists we start by at least leaning to code and I’d advise you too as well if you haven’t started.
Harry Introduced Holly Leslie to the stage, an inspiring young entrepreneur of Adla, who has used AI to become successful at an early age. She shared her thoughts on technology acting as a tool to solve a problem in your life, and it may end up solving others problems too.
In general this was a great workshop educating the teens on the concepts of building an AI, witnessing the success of others using it and also being a part of the process of actually building a model. Most exciting was when @IPsoft who shared there development and applications of their chatbot Amelia which will definitely be an inspiration for the students to use a chat bot for their solution.
If you want to see the final product Teens have developed during the GenZHack follow us on twitter Teens In AI.
By Euan Cortes
