International Academy East Student Develops Healthcare Innovation on Skin Disease Detection with MIT Alumni Through Inspirit AI Leadership Program
AI + X: AI FOR ARTISTS, BIOLOGISTS, AND MORE
AI principles can be applied to solve a boundless set of problems from designing a game of Pac-Man to creating an autonomous assistant for astronauts, and everything in between. Machine learning has also earned a place in creative domains, where art installations often feature artificial intelligence, and mobile applications can turn any photo into a Van-Gogh-esque painting. These far-reaching applications also make AI an important topic of discussion across the humanities with sociological, philosophical, ethical, economic, and psychological implications.
Nurayda Albeez from International Academy recently explored these implications in a project on Skin Cancer Diagnosis as an Inspirit AI Leadership Fellow. After studying machine learning topics including linear and logistic regression, natural language processing, and neural networks in the Inspirit AI Scholars program, leadership fellows wanted to apply these concepts to their passion for Healthcare.
To that end, in the Skin Cancer Diagnosis project, students used computer vision and image classification tools to develop machine learning models to diagnose skin lesion images. They explored a variety of image manipulation techniques and convolutional neural networks as they created an effective model that could help save lives. Students also studied their models for bias, to make sure that it works for people with a variety of skin tones. Finally, AI Leadership Fellows took their models one step further by packaging it into an application with a user interface.
Spanning technical methods and ethical considerations, their interdisciplinary project captured the importance of AI and Healthcare in today’s world, earning high praise from her instructors from Stanford, MIT, and other top universities.
AI FOR SOCIAL GOOD PROJECTS BY AI LEADERSHIP FELLOWS
Nurayda Albeez joined the ranks of other exceptional high-school students across the world, who tackled society’s most impactful issues with AI through a project-based, collaborative approach. By employing programming techniques and qualitative analyses, students built a variety of project applications across many different subject domains:
AI and Biology: Another notable project students work on is to build an AI system that uncovers the underlying system of interaction between proteins. Through combining computational biology and machine learning, they develop an AI model that predicts protein interactions and highlights disease pathways vital for clinical understanding and therapeutic intervention.
AI, Media, and Society: Instructors also lauded the authentic media detection project, where students worked to improve the quality and authenticity of online content by classifying websites as real or fake using real website data. Ethical online behavior is another important application of AI that students explored as part of their research.
AI and Space Safety: Scientifically-minded students work on projects that help design safe space suits by locating astronauts' body positions in 3D using cutting-edge computer vision techniques like semantic segmentation. This was an exciting application to space research and work that channeled the spirit of exploration among students!
AI and Labor Markets: Student Sophia G.’s project also bridged the gap between machine learning and social justice in her “Understanding the Determining Factors of the Gender Wage Gap” project, for which she won 2nd place at the San Diego Broadcom Science and Engineering Fair and the Association for Women in Science award.
CHATGPT, DALL-E AND THE FUTURE OF AI FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Given the impact of generative AI on education and other disciplines, students from a variety of spaces are creating exciting innovations through an ethical lens. Now more than ever, students and educators are looking to understand and apply Generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create exciting innovations.
Some Inspirit AI program graduates furthered their investigations of Generative AI and Ethics in an Independent Project, such as Anitej S. whose project “Is GPT-3 smarter than a sixth-grader?” simulated a student taking a test in three different scenarios using GPT-3 to better understand Chat-GPT’s power for good and for evil.
Within the program a consistent theme was discussing the qualitative effects of AI on society, and how technology can be created responsibly to support innovation towards an AI-powered future.
ABOUT THE INSPIRIT AI SCHOLARS PROGRAM
The Inspirit AI Scholars program, led by graduate students from Stanford and MIT, provides students with an introduction to machine learning, Python, and AI in a project-based environment. Students can complete interdisciplinary group projects and independent 1:1 research projects with mentors from Stanford, MIT, and other leading universities and require no computer science experience to apply. www.inspiritai.com
