Artificial Intelligence

At Iridescent, we focus on helping young people develop the skills and traits they’ll need to succeed later in life — particularly life-long learning, curiosity, and adaptability. Looking ahead, it isn’t difficult to see that all three of those traits will come into play as we develop more and more complex artificial intelligence.

There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty around Artificial Intelligence at the moment. As computers get faster and more powerful, training data sets will get larger, the tooling around them will get more accessible and more and more tasks we previously understood to be too messy for anyone but humans to perform will be tackled by computers.

Which presents us with the question at the heart of our sci-fi fears: What will be left for us to do? What should we teach our children to prepare for?

We should prepare children to be life-long learners — to continuously develop new skills and refine old ones, to change alongside their industries and to adapt to new uses for machines.

We’re preparing young people to adapt to whatever the future may hold

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Techsplorer Event with NVIDIA

In 2017, we partnered with NVIDIA to invite high school students to a day-long event on Artificial Intelligence called Techsplorer. Students met with NVIDIA experts to learn more about Deep Learning, a subset of AI where machines learn to perform tasks better based on algorithms as well as their own interactions with large data sets. The NVIDIA team members worked with students and discussed parallel processing, neural networks, and self-driving cars.

Students were tasked with three design challenges:

Creating a physical network that classifies different types of information by sending data through different nodes
Building a system of circuits to simulate sensors and rapid decision making similar to that in a self-driving car
Working in teams to create a physical parallel processing system that could sort objects quickly and accurately using multiple channels.

All design challenges used very simple materials, but brought to life some of the core concepts underlying parallel computation, neural networks and autonomous vehicles.

Learn more about our Artificial Intelligence Design Challenges

“Problem-solving is like when a pattern won’t work because something new happened, and you need to find out why to adjust the pattern so it works again, but you will need to do this over and over again and this is the learning process for AI.”

LuisTechsplorer participant

Ask the Experts: Artificial Intelligence Interview Series

Jennifer John, 2016 Technovation champion, sat down with experts in the Artificial Intelligence field for a series of interviews. Jennifer spoke with Dr. Subbarao Kambhampati (President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI), Dr. Yolanda Gil (President-Elect of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI), Dr. Dan Jurafsky (Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford), Dr. Kiri Wagstaff(Researcher at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), and Dr. Jennifer Neville (Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Purdue).

Geared toward young people, the interviews and presentations by these well-known scientists address not only their personal journeys, but the views on AI topics including the past of future of AI, natural language processing, AI for Mars exploration, machine learning and what AI means for humanity.

Further Reading

Xinhua: Educational initiative exposes youth to cutting-edge technologies
NVIDIA: GTC Doubleheader: AI, Robotics Events Draws 300 Teen Technologistsblog post about Techsplorer
Huffington Post: Artificial Intelligence – what should we tell our children on why we need to be educating the public about AI
Iridescent’s partnership with AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence)

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