IJCAI 2018 Tutorial
A Design Hackathon for “AI for Social Good” K-12 Outreach
An AI Design Challenge Hackathon hosted by Iridescent
Co-located with IJCAI-ECAI-18
Sunday July 15, 2018
Stockholm, Sweden
Tara Chklovski, Iridescent
Tutorial Description
The “AI for Social Good” Design Hackathon will be a training and practice session based on proven outreach and education methodology. Participants will learn and practice science communication skills meant to help professionals translate their specific areas of expertise to wider audiences, especially children and parents from various backgrounds. These skills will help professionals gain confidence in expressing complex concepts and ideas to a non-science audience and in successfully mentoring students.
Participants will be using Google’s exciting new AIY voice and vision kits to create simple projects that help illustrate different types of problems that can be solved using voice and vision recognition systems. These exciting new kits allow people with little programming experience to actually modify and apply industry-level voice and vision recognition systems and quickly understand the power of AI tools. Participants with compelling project ideas will be able to walk away with their very own Google AIY voice or vision kit!
Tutorial participants will work in teams of 5 and will learn how to develop unique, open-ended, hands-on design challenges that illustrate fundamental AI concepts to K-12 students and their families. Teams will be formed so that participants from different backgrounds get an opportunity to work together. During the tutorial, teams will be trained in K-12 outreach and challenged to identify fundamental AI concepts for which they will rapidly prototype illustrative hands-on designs and models. A successful design will: 1) use very simple materials and basic electrical components (if needed), 2) be open-ended (not just a recipe or demo), 3) authentically convey the spirit of the AI concept to the person doing the challenge, and 4) be fun and engaging for both children and parents.
After the tutorial, participants’ ideas will be shared with a global community of students, families, and schools through the world’s largest AI competition for young students – the Curiosity Machine AI Family Challenge. Curiosity Machine is a free online learning platform and community for families, educators, and program leaders that provides access to 100+ engineering design challenges and curriculum.
The tutorial will be led by Iridescent, a global STEM education nonprofit. Iridescent’s mission is to empower the world’s underrepresented young people, especially girls, through engineering and technology to become innovators and leaders. Iridescent trains parents, educators and mentors to support children over many years in open-ended engineering and technology design challenges.
Help us think about ways to use Google’s AIY kits to solve social and community problems.
As AI becomes increasingly common in the home as well as the workplace, it can also seem increasingly threatening to those unfamiliar with the technology.
An estimate from the World Economic Forum states that 65% of children entering primary school today will find careers in jobs that don’t yet exist. When faced with projections about the impact of AI and new technologies , many parents grow fearful or suspicious of that technology. Our goal is to help reduce this fear and encourage families and students to embrace and learn about the capabilities of technology, and specifically AI.
And you can help. We want your ideas for exciting new content to teach AI to families using Google’s AIY Voice and Vision kits. These exciting new kits allow people with some programming experience to actually modify and apply industry-level voice and vision recognition systems and quickly understand the power of AI tools.
Here are some examples of project ideas that could be solved using the AIY kits:
- Using Google’s AIY Vision kit, build a machine that identifies what type of plastic a bottle is in order to sort recycling.
- Using Google’s AIY Vision kit, build a machine that can tell you what color something is to help someone that is color blind.
- Using Google’s AIY Voice kit, build a machine that can open a door based on a voice command to help someone that is disabled.
- Using Google’s AIY Voice kit, build a machine that can recognize a secret voice code and call a friend if you are in trouble.
Why you should participate:
- Most immediately, you will have an unique opportunity to work with an experienced team to use the Google AIY voice and vision kits to solve exciting problems
- You will be able to take an AIY kit home!
- Your ideas will be codified and introduced to children, parents and educators across 100+ countries through the world’s largest AI program for children.
- Finally, using your creativity and expertise you can help us inspire and empower the next generation of AI inventors, scientists and engineers.
Students build a parallel processing machine
Students learn about self-driving card through a card game
Students learning about Neural Networks
Speaker Bios
Tara Chklovski
Tara Chklovski is the CEO and founder of the global non-profit Iridescent. Tara founded Iridescent in 2006 to create and deliver powerful science, engineering, and technology education to empower underrepresented young people. She has been a frequent speaker for her thought leadership and experience in STEM education – including at the White House and UN. Tara earned her BS in Physics from St. Stephen’s College and a MS in aerospace engineering from Boston University. Tara left her PhD program in aerospace engineering at USC to pursue her social entrepreneurship to found Iridescent and directly empower girls and children everywhere.
Yolanda Gil
Yolanda Gil is Director of Knowledge Technologies at the Information Sciences Institute, and Research Professor in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. Her recent research focuses on automating scientific discovery. She is interested in making AI more accessible for everyone, and teaches courses on data science for non-programmers. She received her PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Peter Nordström
Peter Nordström is a software engineer at Google working with embedded systems in the Research & Machine Intelligence group. Peter received an MS in Electrical Engineering at Linköping University of Technology in Sweden. In the early 90s Peterdid research on underwater explosions and hyrdoacoustics for the Swedish government, and in 1998 he moved to California where he has worked on embedded computing at various companies including Mentor Graphics, NVIDIA, HP, LG. Peter has been with Google since 2015 where he joined the Google Glass team and is currently working on AI cameras.
Resources
- Presentation Slides
- Video from one of the participating teams
- Google AIY
- Curiosity Machine AI Family Challenge
- World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report. (2016)
- Accenture. How AI Boosts Industry Profits and Innovation. (2018)
- Accenture. Reworking the Workforce. (2018)