My Exciting Summer at Stanford AI4All

3 min readAug 20, 2022

Nidhi Parthasarathy, June-July 2022

Nidhi in front of the HAI lab wall at the Stanford Gates Building

This summer, I got the exciting opportunity to attend the AI4All program hosted by Stanford’s HAI (human-centric AI) Lab. I have always been interested in computer science, from a young age, creating apps and coding competitively. However, it was only recently that I started getting interested in AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning). I saw a captivating TED talk from Fei-Fei Li about computer vision and AI and got excited, and the AI4All program was a great opportunity to learn more.

How exactly do we get machines to “think” on their own? Beyond personal assistants like Apple, Siri, and Google Home, and Netflix and Youtube recommendations, where else could ML be used?

The AI4All program lived up to all my expectations and more. After 14 exciting days, jampacked with educational lectures and fun projects to teach us AI/ML, I learned a lot about AI and its numerous applications. I got the opportunity to hear from distinguished researchers in both academia and industry, and learn about the latest developments in the area (and see some very cool demos).

My favorite part of the program was the capstone project where I worked with three other students to develop a new ML application to analyze X-rays to detect chest diseases.

In this series of sixteen blog posts, I will provide a day-by-day description of my AI4All experience. For a shorter summary, please see the article at the Stanford HAI lab blog page.

I hope you have fun following my learning journey, from curious naive questions to developing a working ML application!

Read on for day 1 or go directly to any of the days below based on your interest.