updated Oct 24, 2019

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology area of growing interest …globally… with broad applications in robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical, big data analytics, manufacturing, health care, marketing, HR recruiting, fraud detection, cybersecurity, and much more. Even so, the general public has difficulty separating the hype from the reality.

In response, Discovery Lab - Global (DLG), will launch a special two part Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI / ML) program as part of our Summer at Discovery’s Edge (SADE) designed to peel away the hype and give (extremely motivated) students their initial hands-on real-world experience with programming AI projects.

The AI/ML track is our program’s most technically CHALLENGING and professionally DEMANDING program. This AI/ML program is only for students who crave a technically intense project-based learning experience.

In part 1, interested students - primarily college freshmen & sophomores will be given the opportunity to first participate in an Intro to AI Fundamental seminar series in our 3D virtual campus — as avatars. Others may be accepted on a case-by-case basis -

• The series will consist of one-hour sessions covering an overview of expert systems, autonomy, machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and more.

• The AI seminar series will be conducted over 2-3 weeks in our 3D virtual campus. See the figure below to see the charts from Session #1 of the eight-session Intro to AI Fundamentals seminar series.

• Students with no familiarity with AI will come away from this seminar series held in our 3D virtual campus with a better fundamental understanding of what is Artificial Intelligence and how it works.

In part 2, students will get hands-on experience on an actual AI team-project. Students should have some prior programming experience (e.g. Python, Java, etc) and some college-level math (e.g. algebra, etc).

IMPORTANT — as noted above, this project is the MOST challenging DLG project-based learning experience offered this summer and should not be attempted if a student is not deeply committed to taking FULL ownership …and personal responsibility … for their own success.

This experience is designed to help accelerate a student’s technical and professional development. If successful - and they will be successful if they give their very best effort - the student will be able to put an AI project experience on their resume that will be viewed by future employers as 2-3 years ahead of the student’s peers.

The AI projects will be divided into 2-tracks:

Track 1 is for students who have no background in AI and wish to learn and apply basic principles via a hands-on, project-based approach and Track 2 is for those who have technical background that allow them to accelerate up the learning curve much more quickly. These Track 2 students must meet some basic requirements that will be detailed upon the start of the summer program. One requirement is that the student must have working knowledge of Python, the programming language for the DLG AI projects.

Track 1 students will learn AI Deep Learning principles by working on an AI algorithm that teaches itself how to play a video game … and win. The student will work on a student team utilizing learning materials that will be provided. The student teams will gain familiarity with various AI tools like Tensor Flow. Python is the programming language for this AI project. Interested students will either need to have a working knowledge of Python or sufficient experience with 2 or more programming languages like Java, C++, etc that they can quickly learn Python for this project.

The Track 2 students will be candidates for the AI-electronics projects utilizing processing electronics from the NVIDIA Jetson family of AI processors and will also work on a student team. They will start with the Track 1 project as well before advancing to the Track 2 projects that directly translate to future opportunities in developing AI technologies for autonomous vehicles.

Both the Track 1 and Track 2 students will get an AI opportunity that is not normally available until a student’s senior year of college. That is how uniquely rewarding the DLG SADE experience is meant to be … but it is only available to those students who are intensely committed to taking full ownership and personal responsibility for their own success.