Hi,
I’ve never seen myself as a mathematically talented person even though I’ve successfully completed multiple math and statistics courses at University level with good grades. It has been very exciting to see that I can learn Deep Learning with Fast.ai courses despite not having a PhD or not being the greatest coder in the world as they seem to be saying all over the internet that you have to be those things to understand anything.
I’d like to thank Jeremy and Rachel for putting in the time and effort in to making Deep Learning more accessible and making it easier to learn. I have been very impressed especially with the “top down” teaching method. Thank you!
However, I see the lack of diversity, especially the lack of females, as a big problem within the field of AI. I think Artificial Intelligence is going to be the most impactful technology of our time and no technology is more reflective of its creators than AI. It is made by humans, intended to behave like humans and affect humans. Machine values are actually human values. AI is going to carry the values that matter, be it the ethics, the bias, the justice or the access. And if we don’t have all of us equally represented in the development of this technology, AI is inevitably not going to represent all of us. And I feel like it is our responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen.
All of this inspired me to try to do my part and I reached out for a bit of funding to be able to rent a class room for a non-profit AI/machine learning summer course for high schoolers in my home country aimed to empower, inspire and lower the barriers of entry for young people currently underrepresented in the field AI.
This course will be delivered in cooperation with my current work place, a private AI laboratory and will be free for the kids to apply and participate.
The main focus of this course will be to get the young girls and other participants excited about AI and making sure that they feel that they have gained understanding, practical skills, feel empowered and confident that they have what it takes to keep on learning and continue on their path into the field of AI and tech.
I wanted to reach out to you and ask you a couple of questions as I highly respect your expertise as well as your talent to explain difficult concepts, so that they are easier to understand.
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If you had one week to teach high schoolers (14-16 years old) that don’t have much knowledge about AI or coding what would be the 1-3 most important concepts that you would focus on teaching them? I understand that this field is evolving so fast that I’d really like them to learn some of the key underlying concepts that probably will be useful for them in the future as well.
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I want the course to have a practical side as well and want the problem(s) to focus on solving things that are meaningful for our society. Do you have any good public data sets or problems in mind that might be good for this?
I’m open to any other suggestions or comments as well 