Day 3: Machine Learning, Refugee Integration, and Confidence

Today, Eugene began teaching the campers about machine learning. After discussing what machine learning is and why it’s important, the students learned about the differences between various types of machine learning, including supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning.

Campers learned about the purpose of linear and polynomial regressions, and the importance of neither underfitting nor overfitting the data. Eugene taught the students how to evaluate the accuracy of a model with cost functions and cross validation, as well as how to use stochastic gradient descent to minimize the error of a model.

Campers discuss potential inputs for a regression.

Following Eugene’s lecture, the students heard from Jens Hainmueller, a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Business School at Stanford. Prof. Hainmueller is part of the Immigration Policy Lab, which works with governments to address the current refugee crisis. After giving some background information on the refugee crisis, Prof. Hainmueller described how artificial intelligence and data mining are being used to geographically assign refugees and improve the integration of refugees. He and his lab use supervised machine learning on historical data to determine where each refugee should be placed in order to maximize their probability of employment.

In the afternoon, campers had time to discuss the machine learning concepts they’d learned earlier in the day. Morgan Ames, an ethnographer for AI4ALL with a background in computer science, worked alongside Wells to help the students review.

 

 

Wells helps campers understand weights and error.

Morgan explains how weights of a model are updated.

The campers then got to hear from two women who work at Google, Sherol Chen and Melanie Warrick. Sherol and Melanie told the girls how they became interested in technology and how they got to where they are today.

 

They explained the importance of soft skills such as confidence and resilience, and encouraged the girls to advocate for both themselves and for others. Sherol and Melanie stayed afterwards to continue answering the many questions that the girls had.

As we near the end of our first week, we hope the campers are excited for all that lies ahead!

Blog post and all photos by Anna Wong.