This week marks the start of the CELEHS / HMS Data Science Summer Program! This year program aims to introduce 31 new students to machine learning and programming through a project in which they program machine learning algorithms to recognize images and make a self-driving toy car. The curriculum will emphasize the role of AI in health data science with the inclusion of medical data sets in lectures and programming exercises, and lunchtime talks from professionals who apply machine learning and AI in a variety of professional, research-related and clinical contexts.The program continues to be taught be Biostats alums Aarón Sonabend and Aarón Sonabend, along with current faculty Junwei Lu and Andrew Bean. In addition, we have a huge assist from a number of newcomers and past program participants who are returning as TAs to help new kids work through the construction and programming process and build their own teaching skills. Exciting new developments this year include the implementation of new programming-related teaching modules developed by Nitin Sharma of Paypal Global Data Science, along with a grant from the NIH’s Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) Program, which is supporting the mission to give young students from diverse backgrounds opportunities to learn about AI/ML. Thanks to AIM AHEAD and not-for-profit PARSE, 14 kids will receive the equipment to participate, along with a stipend for successful completion of the program!We continue to have participants join us from across the US and look forward to bringing them together to create an expanding data science community!
