AI Scholars 2024

Artificial Intelligence Projects for High School Students

Developed and Mentored by Stanford and MIT Alumni and Graduate Students

Build an Impactful AI Project

What do self-driving cars, Alexa, automatic cancer diagnosis, and ChatGPT have in common? They are driven by modern advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI is poised to transform our economy, homes, cities, healthcare, transportation, agriculture, education, and more.

Inspirit AI students will work collaboratively in small groups of 5-6 students to implement a mentor-led socially impactful AI project.

Structure of an AI Scholars Project

Students will implement Computer Vision or Natural Language Processing models using Python and associated AI libraries to build this project. The project will help students understanding the data science pipeline for a real-world problem:

  • Data Cleaning and Visualization

  • Building the Initial AI Model

  • Interpreting Results and Improving the AI Model

  • Creating and Delivering Final Presentations and Results

Final Day: Students present their project to parents and guests on the final day. Motivated students may build a web application to showcase their project.

Artificial Intelligence Project Options

AI Scholars complete a project at the intersection of AI and their interest discipline. The program offers projects for aspiring artists, engineers, journalists, biologists, entrepreneurs and more!

“I had an amazing time working on my project! I learnt so much about Siri and a language model called Bert that I didn't even know existed before this program. Overall, this truly ignited a spark of interest in me about natural language processing and I'm so glad to have picked this incredibly interesting topic.”

— Amanya Sahney, B.D. Somani International School

Project Highlights from 2024

Safe ChatGPT: Build an Authentic Chatbot

Using ChatGPT to build a truthful chatbot and avoid “fake-proofing.”

Precision Medicine in Colorectal Cancer

Automating the classification of colorectal tissue types to reduce diagnostic variability.

Moneyball: AI, Sports, and Business

Using AI for sports prediction, inspired by the book and movie Moneyball.

Planet Hunters: Searching for Exoplanets

Using data collected from NASA’s Kepler telescope to train AI to detect exoplanets.

“I found the project extremely interesting and engaging. It was amazing to see how useful AI can be in analyzing things like DNA sequences. I had no idea it was so simple to make these powerful models.”

— Andrew Klearman, Evanston Township School

AI Scholars Project Experiences

  • Arnav D. | Now at Caltech

    AI + ASTRONOMY: SEARCHING FOR EXOPLANETS

    “What was most memorable for me was the intellectually stimulating discussions we had throughout the program and the highly intuitive introduction to fields like Natural Language and Computer Vision.”

  • Laasya E. | Now at University College London

    AI + HEALTHCARE: PNEUMONIA DETECTION

    “Two weeks of learning, brainstorming, debating and coding quite dramatically changed my outlook for the future. We explored the different realms of AI and its amazing real-world applications, from fake news detection to medical imaging. It was these experiences and people I met that encouraged me to apply to UCL to study Computer Science.”

  • Ethan H. | Now at UCLA

    AI + HEALTHCARE: COVID GENOME TRACING

    “I worked on the CoV-SARS-2 genome location tracing project and was able to apply my experience of this project to my current research in biomolecular modelling, which utilizes the Python numpy and scikit packages that I first touched upon during this project in Inspirit AI.”

  • Dhruv J. | Now at Imperial College London

    AI + LANGUAGE: UNDERSTANDING SIRI

    “I worked on the Understanding Siri project in the Inspirit AI Scholars program. I believe this project helped me understand how to implement NLP and state-of-the-art machine learning transformers like the BERT. This project built my interest in natural language processing, and because of that I'm now building my own NLP application.”

  • Ayush S. | Now at UC Davis

    AI + HEALTHCARE: PNEUMONIA DETECTION

    “The pneumonia detection project introduced me to the general machine learning research process, so that I now know how best to continue my journey through learning about computers and what to look for. I spent much time outside the program re-reading our project's code and learning from courses online which the Inspirit AI program instructors had informed me about.”

  • Kalissa G. | Now at Stanford

    AI + POLITICAL SCIENCE: CRIMINAL JUSTICE

    “As an AI Scholar this past year, I collaborated on an AI project that focused on social justice and engaged with fellow students and instructors who have a passion for AI. Having this opportunity to advance my AI skills and learn how AI can be used in so many ways to positively impact society was an invaluable experience prior to college.”

  • Varun M. | Now at University of Illinois

    AI + ENGINEERING: OBJECT DETECTION

    “As a CS major at the University of Illinois right now, I get the choice to explore multiple areas of CS in my upcoming years... [the program] has developed my interest for AI … I am excited to explore.”

Project Curriculum Developers

Meet some of our exceptional team working to develop exciting new projects based on their own research and expertise in AI.

Brianna Chrisman
Healthcare Projects

Education: Stanford, PhD student in Bioengineering
Yale, Bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering

Research/Industry Experience: Works in Dennis Wall's lab in computational genomics, specifically related to evolutionary virology and structural genetic variation. Previously worked as a software engineer at Google.

Aansh Shah
Finance and Business Projects

Education: Brown, Master’s in Computer Science
Brown, Bachelor’s in Applied Math and Computer Science

Industry Experience: Currently an engineer at Amazon working on the Alexa AI. Interests include explainability in AI and deploying models at scale in the world.

Erica Yuen
Arts and Humanities Projects

Education: MIT, Master’s in Computer Science
MIT, Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering

Research Experience: Focus in Human-Computer Interaction, computer vision, image processing. Perviously explored how we can use machine learning to enable creativity.

“Proudly presenting my first and successful AI project at the culmination of the program was definitely the high point of the program. It was almost unbelievable that I could build an AI module in a matter of weeks that can examine the chest X-ray of a patient and diagnose pneumonia reasonably accurately.”

— Amanya Sahney, B.D. Somani International School