AI4All Reflections: A Fantastic Journey of Learning and Self-Discovery

Nidhi Parthasarathy, June-July 2022

This is the concluding post of a series of sixteen blogs summarizing my summer at Stanford’s AI4All program. You can start at the beginning here.

AI4All Program Summary and Reflections

Overall, AI4All has been an amazing experience.

It was great to learn about AI and its numerous applications. Every one of the speakers was amazing and it was truly a privilege to hear from such distinguished researchers in both academia and industry. I really liked the breadth of topics these sessions covered from medical AI to robotics to self-driving cars to ethics to personal development, but also how relatable yet inspiring they all were.

It was even nicer to get an opportunity to work on our own research project. Being able to work on applying ML to medical analytics, especially understanding how to predict disease by analyzing the images in the MedNIST database, was a great opportunity.

I really got a deeper appreciation for how research worked in this space, and our learning on the nature of real-world datasets and the challenges with extracting meaningful ML insights from such data was very insightful.

I also loved the opportunity to work with other students across the country, and particularly appreciated the deep friendships and nice memories I made with the other members of my cohort even when working virtually. I am looking forward to continuing to stay in touch with both my fellow students but also my research mentors.

I am inspired to continue building on what I learned, to try out new applications, and continue doing deeper research in this area. Maybe, I will even get invited to come back and be a speaker in a few years! 🙂

Thank you, AI4All!

(For a longer summary of my AI4All summer experience, see my writeup at the Stanford AI4All blog.)