In Bangalore, India, 10th grader Rahul Jaikrishna developed Cyber Detective – an artificial intelligence-based model that detects cyberbullying with an accuracy of up to 80%. Fourteen-year-old Jaikrishna was inspired after learning that “confession pages” created by school students – online diaries on social media where young people post confessions and secrets – often make teens easy targets for bullying.
Jaikrisha didn’t learn AI programming in his everyday 10th-grade syllabus. He picked it up via the Intel AI for Youth program, which launched in 2019 in three countries and was offered at his school.
This year, AI for Youth will scale to nine countries. And by late 2020, program leaders hope to provide over 100,000 high school and vocational students with vital AI skills, curriculum and resources that can be applied in everyday life.
The skills are critical to accelerating new tools, technologies and applications in industries such as high-tech, healthcare, automotive, industrial and aerospace engineering, and more. A 2019 LinkedIn report notes that AI skills were the second-most in-demand skill behind cloud computing, while Forbes reported on the need to train more skilled AI professionals: “There are about 300,000 AI professionals worldwide, but millions of roles available to fill.” The democratization of AI and deep learning, says Forbes, is increasing the demand for AI professionals.
To fill this need, Intel plans to increase its AI for Youth program to teach as many as 30 million current and future workforce members about AI by 2030.
“Demystifying and democratizing AI for the next generation non-techie workforce is key to fuel mutual growth for countries, industries and broader society for the larger socio-economic revitalization, especially when COVID is impacting the economy and jobs worldwide,” said Brian Gonzalez, senior director of Government Market Trade at Intel. “The AI for Youth program is a testimonial to our commitment to expand digital readiness for all people in the world.”
AI for Youth is offered today at K-12 and vocational schools in eight countries: India, Poland, South Korea, Germany, Singapore, United Kingdom, China and Russia. The United States joins that list today as the program’s ninth country.
Using the principles and techniques they learned as part of the AI for Youth program, students around the world are turning out technology-based solutions.
In November, 17-year old Polish students Jakub Florkowski, Antoni Marcinek, Wiktoria Gradecka and Wojciech Janicki from Jan Kanty High School applied the skills they learned from Intel AI for Youth to create the Hey Teacher! app.
The app match-makes private tutors to interested students in Poland via easy-to-navigate filters like subject, level of education, availability, location and price. The quartet created Hey Teacher! to solve a problem they faced as students: easily locating competent teaching resources to help explain or broaden their knowledge via private tutoring.
And in June 2019, four students at Busan Computer High School in South Korea noticed a staggering amount of energy wasted when they entered an empty computer lab. Despite not being in use, the lab’s air-conditioning, lights and PCs were on. They noticed a similar pattern of energy waste across the school’s 30 classrooms.
Instead of ignoring the issue, Lee Jihong, Kim Eundong, Kim Jidong and Lee Seungyun created Energy Guard. They spent seven months developing an AI algorithm that pairs a PC and a webcam with computer vision and other analytics to count the number of people present in a room and toggle on or off the room’s power supply.
The system is currently in pilot at the school’s PC lab. After the trial, Energy Guard will be expanded to over 30 rooms in the school. The group has set a goal of covering over 10,000 classrooms across South Korea.
