The CELEHS/HMS Data Science Summer Program recently concluded with some stellar presentations by a new crew of budding data scientists! It was particularly exciting to watch as the participants worked through troubleshooting – both mechanical and conceptual – as they trained a convolutional neural network to teach their toy cars to recognize and respond to visual cues.
This year we had a wonderful and diverse group of lunchtime speakers who again inspired participants to think big about the wide range of possible applications for machine learning. Our thanks to them, and to Nitin Sharma of Paypal who joined the teaching crew and provided new training materials as well as Dr. Hui Wang, VP of Paypal Global Data Science who kindly provided additional technical and financial support to our program. Thanks also to instructors Jesse Gronsbell (‘17), Aaron Sonabend (‘21), Junwei Lu, Andrew Beam, Bryan Cai, Nitin Sharma, program administrator Amanda King, along with TAs Vidul Ayakulangara Panickan, Zebin Wang, Winston Cai, Kevin Pan, Alex Hu and Jose Luis Almeida, who tirelessly provided support throughout the program, along with around the clock assistance over Slack and the creation of exercise notebooks and YouTube demos. All of the materials from the program will soon be made freely available online. Stay tuned for the link.Our final note of gratitude goes out to program leader Tianxi Cai, and sponsors PARSE, and NIH’s Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) Program, who provided stipends for participating students with financial needs, enabling the program to support its mission of providing AI/ML education opportunities to students from under-served populations.
