What High School Students Love About Inspirit AI
Inspirit AI’s students come from such diverse backgrounds and experience with artificial intelligence and code so we wanted to ask them which parts of the program stuck with them the most. While we received many different answers, we noticed a common theme of students loving working with a group to create an artificial intelligence project and the opportunities they had to learn from graduates from Stanford, MIT, and other elite STEM universities.
Jeremy Lu’s favorite part of Inspirit AI was interacting with his peers and working with his instructor to complete a finished demonstration of their project “that we were able to manifest and work on every technical piece of it along the way.”
Ally Bush also loved the final presentation and group work in general. She also loved getting to know people from all over the country and the world!
It was really hard for Christina Liao to choose what part of Inspirit AI was her favorite, but if she had to choose it would be listening to the other students present their projects. “Everyone who participated in this program worked hard on their specific projects that they were assigned to, and it was really nice to just see everyone talk about what they had been working on for the past week. We got the chance to hear what our peers had learned which amazed me yet again as I was reminded of the vastness of AI.”
Diya Hituvalli liked how while she and her fellow students were learning about Artificial Intelligence concepts, they were also learning about real-world applications for those topics. “For example, using CNN to classify whether something is a dog or a car. This really helped me understand the topics better as well as showed me the wide range of AI applications in today's world.”
Curtis Lin enjoyed being able to connect with instructors and listen to their stories and hear about what brought them to connect with Artificial Intelligence.
Truc Hoang also loved the instructor spotlights because he was able to better understand how Artificial Intelligence can be used in different fields.
Akhil Iyer’s favorite part of the program was the final presentation. “I had a lot of fun making my slides and finding information for my presentation and it also helped build my confidence.”
Andrew Klearman loved interacting with all of the amazing teachers and watching their spotlight presentations. “I found their work to be very inspiring and they made me super excited to start my own career in computer science.”
Derin Algül’s favorite activity was also the final presentation. “While working on our own, we got to summarize what we had done during the whole week, and while listening to other presentations we learned a lot of new topics. It was a nice event that allowed everyone to share their knowledge and ask questions about other topics. It was also very practical as everyone had done a good job of explaining their topics in a simple manner. For example, in our own topic, DNA detectives would require everyone to read the biology blog posts we had read to fully understand everything, but while presenting we explained every detail in a simple yet powerful way so we were able to summarize the key points the audience needed in order to understand our AI model.” But most of all, Derin loved the environment of the final presentations. Everyone asked his and other groups lots of questions that made Derin feel like his work was appreciated.
Like Derin, Vishnu Nandurkar felt great pride when presenting his first and very successful Artificial Intelligence project. “It was almost unbelievable that I could build an AI module in a matter of weeks that can examine the chest X-ray of a patient and diagnose pneumonia reasonably accurately. [...] I [also] thoroughly enjoyed the sessions on sharing of university admissions and college life experience by instructors.”
Alexa Lowe’s favorite part of the program was the overview of many different Artificial Intelligence models she learned and how the program broadened her view of the field, rather than only focusing on one specific technique. “It was a great introduction for me.”
Duriya Rehan’s most memorable day of the program was the day she presented her project with her group. “The instructors’ final words made me reflect on this experience and I realized how much I had grown since the beginning of the camp. I started off not knowing how to code and struggling while solving a problem related to IPLtickets and by the end, I was able to create an AI project related to disaster relief. Watching everyone else’s presentations was enlightening and made me learn more about AI and its applications.”
Mahima Agrawal also loved the final projects and presentations. “My favorite part of the program overall was the last day in which all of the groups presented each of their results along with their project goal. It was really fascinating to see the goals of each group and the direction they went toward it.”
Like many of her fellow students, Amanya Sahney’s favorite part of the program was the group project she worked on, as well as the additional workshops. “The group projects gave me a deeper insight of certain topics that interested me like Natural Language Processing and taught me a lot of complex problems and solutions that helped me develop a better understanding of the topic. Additionally, the workshops like the GANs workshop and the college essays also enlightened me on the other aspects and topics of AI along with the steps to take to potentially get into a high-profile university. I had an amazing time and every aspect of this course taught me something new about AI that I will always remember and possibly take forward in the future!”
