To demystify and explain AI to school students, the IIT Madras Alumni Association hosted a talk between Professor Balaraman Ravindran and school kids, college-goers, and even business professionals. The idea was to understand everyone’s level of understanding of the technology and see their perspective along with clarifying their doubts.
The success of any technology depends on the diversity in areas of application and acceptance and understanding at all levels. By all levels, we mean people of all ages and stages must see some benefit around the technology. For artificial intelligence, it’s essential that people feel a connection with it. They should be able to relate to it.
Artificial Intelligence influences almost all aspects of our everyday lives – in our mobile phones, social media sites, self-driving cars & even our washing machines! But what exactly is AI?
In one such e-event, intended to demystify and explain AI to school students, the IIT Madras Alumni Association hosted a talk between Professor Balaraman Ravindran and school kids, college-goers, and even business professionals. The idea was to understand everyone’s level of understanding of the technology and see their perspective along with clarifying their doubts.
Prof. Balaraman Ravindran, Dept. of Computer Science, IIT Madras, is also the head for Robert Bosch Center for DSAI.
The event had students from various standards converse with Prof. Ravindran in an informal setup. Then, Prof. Ravindran explained AI at 5 different levels to the school students.
The event started with Prof. Chatting with a student from grade 6, Naina Mahajan, who shared her fascination with AI and said, “As per her understanding AI is all about humanizing computers.”
Naina asked Prof. Ravindran that is it complicated to imbibe emotional and social qualities in computers or robots? Prof. Ravindran answers the question, “We can write programs that mimic some things based on some kind of set rules. However, the computer won’t have any internal drivers.”
The discussion also went around how AI has immensely contributed to the day-to-day events like using google maps or even the much talked about self-driving cars. Prof. Ravindran also picked up a relatable example of Google and explained how the search engine gets its precision from AI-based algorithms.
For level 2, the Prof. interacted with Anshuman MJ of class 10, who shared his thoughts about AI. He also talked about how AI is not a very new concept. It started around 1956 with John Mccarthy. His group met during the Dartmouth conference and declared that they were working on a new concept named Artificial Intelligence. The discussion then revolved around how the improvements in compute power and better processing led to the progress in AI.
Prof. Ravindran explained the BlackBox problem with AI, where we often have no idea what caused a certain output. He also said, “AI trained using data with bias may give biased outputs, but there are ways to solve it.”
The next level was a discussion with a student of the English language. There is a lot of work that happens with AI and languages. This level included discussions around how important it s to involve people from social science as we try to solve the ethical problems associated with AI, such as bias and fairness. Prof. further added to the discussion that AI needs new data to change over time. With no additional training, the output of the AI is fixed. The impact of AI can be very subtle and one must be careful while making use of it.
Level 4 of the discussion had the Professor talking to Gayathri, a fifth-year student. Here, Prof. Ravindran threw light on the fact that although mathematics attracts many AI today, the original motivation was to understand human thinking. The underlying principles behind most of AI technology are straightforward, but the overall dynamics of learning are not fully understood.
He also added, “Whether AI can ever sufficiently mimic the human brain is even today an open ended question with no clear answer.”
Level 5 of the session had Mr. Raghu Venkat, Co-founder, and CTO at Actyv sharing his thoughts and discussing how Raghu looks at AI. Actyv uses classical AI techniques to generate credit scores of loan applicants, enabling new ways of lending. The two also talked about how most AI research was limited to labs earlier. However, over the last decade or so, AI adoption by startups and industries has skyrocketed.
AI is a tool to empower humans, not to replace them. Hence it is imperative to spread the correct information, possibilities, and scope of this technology at all levels. The intent is to make people comfortable with the technology and understand that AI truly has transformational powers.
Original News Link
https://indiaai.gov.in/article/ai-explained-at-5-levels-by-iit-m-s-prof-b-raveendran
