AI4ALL
AI4ALL opens doors to Artificial Intelligence for historically excluded talent through education and mentorship. They conduct summer programs at universities across the US and offer extensive support to the alumni through their Changemakers in AI program.
Summer Program
The AI4ALL summer programs first entered our radar for my daughter, who had a long-time interest in AI. She attended the 3-week camp at Princeton in 2019 and had a blast learning about different ML algorithms & AI ethics, conducting a hands-on research project using genomic data, and touring Washington DC to meet AI policy makers. The alumni network was even more impressive, with frequent updates on opportunities for internships and continued education.
Portfolio Project
Soon, I found myself following along, learning these new concepts through their Open Learning platform for educators, then eventually studying deep learning and NLP on my own. A few months ago, I received a volunteer request for their 8-week long summer portfolio project. Students who already completed the regular summer program are given the opportunity to apply and deepen their knowledge of AI by working on an extended personal project. They attend weekly workshops, learning to select and pre-process their dataset, train and evaluate a model, then deliver a poster presentation of their findings.
Students were divided into 3 areas of interest: numeric, text, and images then paired with mentors having relevant experience. My mentees worked on natural language processing tasks, using BERT to classify text. I created a couple videos below and also wrote a tutorial notebook to help get them started.
Since AI4ALL has a rigorous applicant screening process, all the participants were very bright and motivated, which led to a very reward mentoring experience.
Conclusion
I can fully attest to “teaching is the best way to learn.” While homeschooling my kids, I was constantly learning new material and always thinking, “How would I explain this?” That mentality forced me to think more deeply and analytically. As the kids are off in more traditional educational settings now, it’s been a natural transition for me to return to my work in the technology sector and also mentor other students. Mentoring has been an excellent way to supercharge my upskilling. I previously wrote about my experience with Technovations.
I’d love to learn more about the many other wonderful programs out there. If you haven’t had a chance to share your skills through mentoring, definitely give it a try!