Intro Post
Tell us a little bit about yourself! What are your hobbies? Why are you studying artificial intelligence? Anything else we should know?
Hi!! My name is Rujuta and I’m a senior in high school. I love playing tennis, listening to music, and doing yoga. I’m studying artificial intelligence because I want to use AI to build projects that help tackle ableism in our society and help people with disabilities. I’m active in an organization that works with kids with special needs and I hope to be able to help people like them in the future.
What was your AI Scholars experience like? Who was your instructor and what was it like working with them? What project did you work on?
My AI Scholars experience was a lot of fun because I was able to work with NLP models to improve disaster relief. Before the program, I didn’t even know NLP could be used for something like that. My instructor at the beginning of the program was John Heyer and working with him was really fun because he would take the time to explain other parts of the machine learning process and it helped me better understand the concepts overall. My project instructor was Angela Gu and she did a great job of talking us through the “why” of the code.
What AI topic will you be writing about in your blog? Describe your topic in detail!
In my blog, I will be writing about AI+ethics, especially biased models. From actually collecting data on which to train models on, to safety and privacy once the model has been build, ethics are important at each step of the AI process. Biased models are models that have been trained on data that are inherently biased, or have a tendency to lean towards a certain result. This bias presents itself in a model that might be perpetuating discrimination or prejudice that it was built with the intention to prevent. For example, a hiring model by Amazon was discovered to be discriminating against female candidates. This was because most of the resumes used as training data were from men because of how male dominated the STEM field is.
Who is your target audience? Why should they be interested in your blog?
My target audience is anyone that is currently working with AI or plans to in the future. They should be interested in this blog because being aware of ethical problems (such as biased models) in AI is the first step in combating the problem and creating more fair models in the future.
What are you hoping to achieve with your blog?
With my blog, I am hoping to bring awareness to ethical issues that can frequently occur in AI. I think it’s really important that we are aware of such problems so we can work on solutions to overcome them.
Rujuta Swadi is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.