Intro Blog

Hey, Ani Aggarwal here. This is my first in a series of blogs inspired by the AI course I am partaking in, Inspirit AI. More details about this program are located at the end of this blog.

On me

I’m a junior in a high school located in the Bay Area, and being surrounded by tech startups powered by AI has given me an opportunity to learn from and connect with some of the most incredible people I’ve met. Outside of my school work and coding, I love playing sports and working out, and I particularly enjoy martial arts and other similar contact sports. I did Taekwondo for almost eight years before receiving my black belt, and nowadays I wrestle and practice Muay Thai.

I have been interested in computers for years, and in the time I’ve spent coding, I’ve come to love machine learning and artificial intelligence. I find computer vision applications of AI especially interesting and more rewarding than many other AI specializations. I still love learning about the latest advances in other areas, but computer vision holds a special place in my heart.

On this blog

As you may have guessed, this blog will be computer vision heavy, and I plan on taking you on a journey with me through my projects and research in this field. My next few blog posts will be part of a mini-series on multiple objects tracking with a recurrent YOLO network. YOLO networks are excellent at detecting and classifying multiple features in an image, and combining that with a recurrent LSTM or similar architecture should allow multiple objects to be tracked at once in a video. Conceptually, this implementation should be successful, but it will be a technically complex project for me, so stick around to see the process and the end result.

Those of you who are interested in computer vision and its implementations in projects such as the upcoming one, follow this blog, especially if you like to understand both the conceptual basis of projects as well as the technical details. Hopefully, you’ll learn something with me or see a new way to do a task you were already familiar with. My goal is to provide you with engaging blogs on AI, mainly in computer vision, although I may venture into other areas as long as the topics are entertaining or informative.

On Inspirit AI

I began with Inspirit AI through their AI Scholars program where I got to delve deeper into learning about AI than my previous dabbles through YouTube and Udemy had taken me. I got to learn about a variety of different AI specializations from NLP to CV to AI in healthcare and finance. I worked with a team of other students led by MIT M.S. John Heyer and Stanford Ph.D. Eli Wang. We worked to create an emotion detection AI to assist autistic children who aren’t able to recognize facial expressions effectively. It was a great experience being able to interact with people who worked and were knowledgeable in this field to use AI for a project that benefits others. From this experience, I found that I enjoyed CV the most as I could actually see my model segment lung scans rather than be told that a 5 cm long petal is representative of an Iris Versicolour.

Ani Aggarwal is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.