TEENS IN AI-2018 DAY 1–22nd AUG’18

DAY 3

On day three, we moved from the BBC’s Broadcast Centre in Shepherd’s Bush to the famous Broadcasting House at Oxford Circus.

The day began with a morning scrum meeting for each team, who sought to use the information and guidance taken from yesterday’s sessions with the Leanne and Hannah.

Ali Shah, the BBC’s Head of Emerging Technology and Strategic Direction, gave the keynote address on the critical topic of Ethics & AI. The group found the talk very engaging, saying “that is gave more insight into the ethical side of the AI” and that they particularly “liked how he explained the algorithms”

The BBC UX&D team joined in next for a session on design thinking and developing new ideas. Participants felt “that putting our teams ideas on a chart of impact against effort was quite a good way of sorting our ideas and seeing which ones would be the most viable”

For a ‘Lunch and Talk’, LJ Richthe presentor of BBC show ‘Click’ joined us to discuss technology, and what she does at her job. “LJ Rich was genuinely awesome, for she knew how to be inspirational and lift the teens spirits”.

This was followed by a further session of design thinking with the BBC UX&D team, during which the teams made storyboards, prototyped, and tested their ideas.

Aparna Ashok, a Service Designer, Tech anthropologist and AI ethics researcher,

took the time to video-call us from India to do some 1-on-1 mentoring with each team. This was an amazing way for each of the accelerator team to get a new perspective on their ideas, and hear from an expert in the field. Teams felt that “She gave some very good advice economically and recommended some algorithms” and that Aparna “raised some good questions about our idea which we hadn’t thought about and also gave some ideas as to how our idea could be commercialised.”

The day finished with a talk from the BBC’s Head of Data Science SolutionsMagda Piatkowskawho began by talking about her educational journey, her studying of neural networks and how AI has grown as a field. Data became her focus, and she followed this through working at a games company through to the BBC. People found “interesting to see how the BBC uses AI” and that the talk was “nice and personal”.

With that Day three concluded.

Originally published at Acorn Aspirations.