On April 29, a Master Class, “What is Artificial Intelligence and How Does it Work?” was conducted for schoolchildren in grades 8-10. The Class was part of the “Future Professionals in the Digital Economy” regional project with support fr om the NSU Mathematics and Mechanics Department and the NSU Stream Data Analytics and Machine Learning Laboratory. The main objective of the project is to create a platform for the professional orientation of schoolchildren and students at technical schools in the Novosibirsk region. Today there are many professions that did not exist 10-15 years ago. Various studies show that more than half of current students and students in the near future will have careers in specialties that have just started to appear.
The question of how to choose a profession is one of the most relevant for secondary and technical school graduates. It acquires special significance in the midst of the digitalization of the economy that includes automation, the development of artificial intelligence, and new cognitive systems.
The NSU Master Class on artificial intelligence was conducted by Olga Yakovenko, a first-year student in the English-language Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Master's Program, She talked about studying machine learning, the types of artificial intelligence, and why all of this will be relevant in the next 20 years.
Today machine learning specialists are not just in demand, they are in short supply! Machine learning professionals must not only have solid mathematical training and programming skills, but should be capable of navigating current trends in science and business. This last aspect means an ability to formulate relevant machine learning tasks and to interact with representatives from a wide range of fields from oil workers to lawyers.
During the practical part of the Master Class, participants were asked to train convolutional neural networks to distinguish objects in images using a special training application.
Master Class participant Natasha Zhukova said,
I am interested in the development of artificial intelligence because it is a promising field. I liked the workshop, especially the practical part wh ere we learned how to teach a car to distinguish one dog from another.
During the Master Class, students were introduced to the various areas of artificial intelligence that students in the Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Program and at the Stream Data Analytics and Machine Learning Laboratory are engaged in: processing natural languages including speech recognition and text tonalities, speech recognition for the deaf-mute according to EEG data, network traffic analysis, geological and physical data analysis, computer vision including face recognition and other objects in photo and video images, MRI images.