Self-driving cars, paintings authored by algorithms, artificial intelligences that seem almost human — machine learning is the thread that ties these amazing technologies together. So, is machine learning only accessible to researchers and engineers at powerful tech companies? Nope! This camp was designed — by an expert with a PhD from Harvard’s machine learning lab — to introduce you to the world of machine learning. No computer science or machine learning experience is expected.
When?
Every Saturday, 10:00am-12:00noon, April 15 - June 3, 2023 (8 sessions)
Who?
This camp is for students aged 12-16 years.
Cost:
The camp fee is $295 (including taxes and all materials).
If the fee is a barrier to your participation, a limited number of bursaries are available for eligible families - please email camps@visst.ca to inquire.
Where?
The Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology (VISST) - 1490 West Broadway,Vancouver, BC.
Why should you attend?
Join an eye-opening experience learning about a technology that affects us all, but that few people understand.
Gain experience in areas you won’t find in school, including how machine learning works and how it can be used or misused in society.
Enjoy a tailor-made machine learning curriculum for your age group, created by a team with strong experience in both machine learning and education. This will be hard to find somewhere else!
Meet like minded people with common interests in important areas of technology, science, and life.
Earn a certificate of completion from the Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology.
What will you learn?
Decision Trees: How does our email flag spam messages? How does our phone suggest what words to type next? We will investigate the decision tree learning algorithm, an intuitive and approachable machine learning method. While the methods used in practice are often more complex, with decision trees we can already explore the basic ideas of machine learning: how it works, why it works, and what it’s capable of.
Metrics and NLP: A fundamental question in machine learning is how to know if your ML algorithm is working. When playing a game of Candy Crush or Ultimate Frisbee, it’s pretty clear who is winning - we have a score for that! In machine learning, it’s not always easy to know if your algorithm is working as intended - and it’s also really important! We’ll delve into this question, working through fundamental concepts that every machine learning practitioner thinks about on a daily basis. Then, we’ll show how machine learning can be used for natural language processing (NLP), for example by understanding English text.
Computer Vision: When you take a picture with your phone, how does it recognize faces in the image? Do we need new algorithms when working with images and videos, or can we reuse what we already had? On Day 3 we’ll dive into computer vision, meaning algorithms that let computers “see”. We’ll think about how images and videos are stored in a computer, and then we’ll jump into some amazing examples of this technology at work.
Artificial Intelligence: How does machine learning relate to artificial intelligence? And what about those AI systems in the news like AlphaGo or self-driving cars? We’ll introduce the big ideas in machine learning that can be used to create intelligent systems. Then we’ll delve into some examples and see these algorithms in action!
ML in our Society: Machine learning has been incredibly successful in recent years, but at what cost? Recent books like Weapons of Math Destruction and movies like Coded Bias are revealing how machine learning can perpetuate bias and unfairness in our society. We’ll ask where machine learning is used (answer: a lot of places!) and how it is affecting us (answer: in more ways than we might think!).
Additional Notes:
Students should bring their own laptops.
Refund policy: Email us at least 1 week (7 days) prior to the start of the camp for a full refund.
Instructor
Sky Sheng
Sky is a PhD student at UBC where she specializes in Applied Animal Biology with a focus on computer science. She applies her machine learning and data science skills to conduct research on animal behavior, health and welfare. Known for her ability to break down complex concepts and make them easy to understand, Sky has a proven track record of mentoring undergraduate and graduate students in programming and data analysis. Driven by a desire to inspire and empower students, she is passionate about fostering personal growth and sparking a love of science in her students.
Testimonials
“It was really fun to train the machines with different pictures and also to experiment around with them!”
——- Machine Learning, Demystified 2022 participant
“This was a fantastic camp which talked about unique concepts that are not usually taught at a summer camp.”
——- Machine Learning, Demystified 2022 participant
“Thanks for an awesome camp guys. I had a great time. I would definitely recommended this camp to my friends :)”
——- Machine Learning, Demystified 2021 participant
Questions?
Please email camps@visst.ca