AI4All Day 13: Sprinting to the finish, AI for Sustainability
Nidhi Parthasarathy, Thursday, July 14th, 2022
Preparing for the project presentation
Today, in our cohort groups, we worked on our presentation for the next day.
We had worked late last night talking to each other and fixing the code and trying out new things. Our big challenge was to get good precision and recall with our model. We researched similar approaches on the web and talked to other groups. We tried breaking our confusion matrices across all the different classes to understand what was happening. After several iterations, we finally improved our accuracy and precision, but realized that the recall would still be bad because of the nature of our dataset that was skewed to more negative samples than positives.
It was great to experience the ups and downs of real research and learn how real-life machine models needed a lot more complex tuning and understanding before they could be useful.
AI for Sustainability
In the afternoon session, we had a talk from Stefano Ermon on AI for sustainability.
The presentation was extremely interesting and brought a new insight on how AI could be used for sustainability in addition to what we had previously discussed about AI in autonomous vehicles, medical science, and computer assistance.
He talked about a project using satellite images and deep learning to understand economic well being in Africa. He talked about how there was not enough data around big problems like poverty and his journey from using surveys to satellite images in his research and how that helped with the AI model getting to be almost as good as ground-based surveys.
This was an interesting area and I learned a lot, but I also realized there was a lot more for me to learn in this area.
Presentations + Social
We spent the rest of the day working on our presentations.
It was fun to break up the talk into various components and work on our individual slides while also providing comments on others’ work and making all the slides flow well together.
After finishing the presentation, we talked to each other about our lives in different places around the world and decided to stay in touch afterwards. For the social hour, we played our last mafia game. I am going to miss everyone!
Did our project presentation go well? Read on for the fourteenth and final blog post of this series.
