Artificial Intelligence for Beginners

• What is Artificial Intelligence?
  • Flexible definition because the field is always developing
  • Intelligent systems taught by humans
  • Many subtopics, such as computer vision, natural language processing, etc.
  • Computers can “see” patterns based on many, many examples
  • Turing Test
• Narrow vs. General AI
  • Will/Can AI take over the world?
• AI Vocabulary (Neural Networks, Algorithm, Deep Learning, Supervised vs. Unsupervised Learning, Machine Learning...)
  • Rise in the use of Neural Networks
• Real World Applications/Current Research
  • Google Deepmind's AlphaGo
  • Daily uses of AI (Siri, speech recognition, medical uses, autocorrect, translation...)
  • Controversies (job losses, self-driving car crashes…)
  • Biased Systems (coming from biased data which reflects our society)
    • Shows the importance of having more women in this field

Python Basics

• What is programming and why Python?
• Commenting
• Variables (including data types)
• Operations and Operators (logical, mathematical, and relational)
• Concatenation (what can or can’t you do)
• Lists and Dictionaries (examples of data structures)
• If-Else Statements
• Functions (how to define them, what they are, and what they are used for)
• For-While Loops
• Many hands-on examples to solidify understanding through application

Hands On Projects/Activities

• COZMO Maze Project: Each group of 4 girls will complete a maze project where the objective is to navigate the robot through the maze while also completing the “extra requirements” in the drag-and-drop block coding mode on the COZMO app.
• Various Interactive Exercises to further grasp the various Python concepts.
• A larger coding project where the students will code a series of games or other exercises such as Mad Libs, Connect 4, Hangman... etc.

• Connecting AI topics to a real project
  • Hands on interactions with an AI to understand in depth the theoretical concepts
  • This will include a time for the students to experience the Google AIY Vision Kit, an interactive, hands-on computer vision kit which will help students see an application of computer vision in their own hands.