AI4All Day 14: The Final Day, Exciting Capstone Presentations, AI4All Alumni Changemakers

Nidhi Parthasarathy, Friday, July 15th, 2022

Our Last Cohort Meeting

We met in the morning with the rest of our cohort group and did a final runthrough of our presentation and made some last-minute changes. We got a chance to thank our research mentors. They had truly been so helpful all through the program and we had all learned so much from them.

A Panel from AI4All Alumini

The next session was an “AI4All changemakers” panel. They encouraged us to join the alumni group and gave us lots of useful advice about our AI journey. The panelists were all AI4All alumni from across the country, most of them in college (UC Berkeley, NYC, Harvard, UMass, Detroit), but also a few high school juniors and seniors. The panelists talked about their projects and internships after AI4All and discussed how the alumni program had helped them.

They also gave us good advice about a range of topics from their experience at AI4All to writing good college applications. One piece of advice that I really liked was from Hanna Chang. She told us to find a story that connects everything that we have done and to make sure that we were upfront about our flaws and how they made us who we are. She said we should talk about who we are and our personalities rather than repeat what is already on our applications. I found this advice very useful as a lot of people like to hide their flaws but I also think it is very important to learn from your flaws and improve as a person. I also liked the advice from Philip that we should do things that we really enjoyed and wanted to succeed in.

One other important topic that people kept bringing up throughout the panel was the importance of networking. This reminded me of the talk earlier. “It’s not what you know or who you know it is who knows what you know.”

The Presentations

The afternoon session featured the end-of-summer presentations from the various teams.

The robotics group went first. They did a project with a virtual airplane simulator and trained their model with real life airplanes to make the airplane on screen land correctly. The project was extremely cool!

We (the medical AI group) were next and we presented our results and our journey navigating the challenges with the multilabel multiclass classification problem. I thought our presentation went well (but I maybe a bit biased! :) A crowd favorite was how we presented our problem through a story about a man named Bob with pneumonia. We got a lot of good questions and reflecting on our answers, it was interesting to see how much we had learnt over the past few weeks!

The computer vision team presented after us, and discussed how they used satellite images to make conclusions about the environment. They did an amazing job showing all the different accuracies including their testing versus training comparisons.

The final presentation was from the NLP team, who also did an amazing job with their project. I really liked how they showed how tweets could give information about how people were faring during large hurricanes like hurricane Sandy and help guide response efforts.

The presentations were followed by a closing ceremony. We went through a slide show with all our pictures and what we liked the most about the program and got to talk about our experiences and learnings. We all took a group picture together (on zoom of course). We had a chance to thank the organizers once again and learn about how to stay in touch.

Read on for my final blog post on my reflections from the overall program.