Inspirit AI Overview by an AI Ambassador
By Rushil Y. (View Rushil’s original post on Medium here)
Recently I completed a 10-week program with Inspirit AI, a company that provides online education in artificial intelligence (AI). Over the 10 weeks it goes over various machine learning concepts and models. The course is tailored for beginners, with little to no programming knowledge necessary to understand the course material. I was curious to share my experience with others, so I decided to write this blog post.
What I Enjoyed Most
I enjoyed many things about the Inspirit AI program, but the thing I enjoyed the most was the hands-on project. In this project, we were tasked with building a NLP (Natural Language Processing) model that could predict the sentiment of financial news stories. This was a great opportunity to apply what I had learned in the program to a real-world problem. I had the chance to work with other students on the project, and hear from a variety of perspectives. This fostered collaboration, and we finished out the project by creating a presentation that provided a brief overview on what we did.
Example slide from our presentation on NLP
What I Learned
The Inspirit AI program gave a thorough overview on the Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning space. I learned about the different types of AI models and the workings behind them. Some of these models include logistic regression, CNNs (Convolutional Neural Network), and LSTM (Long Short Term Memory). While not taught on a deep mathematical level, the instructors were able to provide a general explanation on how each model manipulated data to produce a result. I even learned about the ethical considerations of AI and other related topics regarding the industry.
Overall Thoughts
I had a great experience with the Inspirit AI program. I learned a lot, made new friends, and am now more confident in my ability to use AI. I would recommend, specifically for beginners who wish to gain an in depth understanding of Artificial Intelligence.
One Moment That Stood Out
One moment that stood out to me in the program was when we were learning about neural networks. We were shown a visualization of a neural network in action, and it was amazing to see how the model interpreted hand-written images through each of the neural network layers. It was a testament to the power of AI.
Here is the particular website to those that are interested: https://poloclub.github.io/cnn-explainer/
How Inspirit AI Can Improve the Program
While the program was a great introduction to AI/ML for someone without any programming experience, I felt that for those that had prior Python experience could have been in a separate cohort that could have explored further.
Lastly, with the current hype cycle around ChatGPT, Bard and many others Generative AI apps exploration of these tools can make the course more exciting for high school students.
I hope Inspirit AI considers these suggestions as I believe they would make the program even more valuable for students.
