My dad really wanted me to get into Artificial Intelligence this summer. (If you don't know what that is, it's the idea and development of computer systems that are trained to be capable of performing tasks that normal require human intelligence to do. For example, a person can train a computer to recognize whether a person is being mean, by showing it what being mean sounds/looks like. ) Dad said that Artificial Intelligence will get popular very soon, and I think that he is probably right. So far, some companies have been working hard on self driving cars, robots that do human jobs, and all sorts of Artificial Intelligence ideas. I don't want to be left behind!
My dad had me go on a website called machinelearningforkids and work on some of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) projects on that website. I wasn't comfortable with the idea at first, but so far it has turned out to be really fun and enjoyable!
This website allowed me to train my computer using supervised learning, the machine learning task of teaching a computer from the training data I labeled. The training data always consisted of the set of training examples I made. Then I would open the project in Scratch, a programming language used to make the project come to life by drawings and code blocks. I think this site is really cool.
The first project I did was called Make Me Happy, and the idea was that when you typed something into the writing bar, the computer would classify whether you typed something mean or not in the writing bar. Then a face drawn on the screen would make either a happy of sad face. My dad showed me how to download the instructions for it.
I found the project pretty simple, once I got the hang of it. I created a project, then created two bins for text. One was labeled, "Mean Things to Say" and the other was labeled, "Nice Things to Say". Next came the most fun part of the project. I got to put good pieces of text in the "Nice Things to Say" bin, and mean pieces of text in the "Mean Things to Say" bin. I had a good time doing that, because I could be creative, coming up with all sorts of nice or mean things to say.
After I felt confident in my typed words, I hit the train button. It took a few minutes to train, and when it finished training, I opened the project up on Scratch. Excitedly, I created a sprite (a character), and three costumes (Ways for the character to look) for it. The sprite looked like a smiley face, but with a straight line instead of a smile, to make it look neutral. This was one costume, and the other two were happy looking, and sad looking.
I continued to program the project so that when someone typed something into the typing bar, the computer would classify it as happy or sad, then act accordingly. When the text was kind, the face would look absolutely delighted, and bounce up and down saying nice things back. When the text was mean, the face would look miserable and sink to the bottom of the page.
Artificial Intelligence isn't exactly like a human, but it's close.
Later in the day, my dad tested my project. Being older and knowing more words, he caused my project to make a mistake, since it was not familiar with "divine". So the next day, I retrained the project. This time, I had a few new words to add (Thanks, Dad!), so it worked and I was very pleased. Dad couldn't find anything wrong with it. After all, I was very happy to have created something on my own that worked properly. I can't wait to do my next project!
One little bit of advice I would give you, if you also are using machine learning for kids, is to save your projects on scratch a lot. Every time you refresh the page, or go to another tab for a few seconds, save the project first. One time while I was working on my project, I went to check the instructions and I came back to find my scratch project erased! I had to remake it. That was kind of fun, though. I got to fix any mistakes I couldn't fix before.
I think this project has been really excellent fun to make. I feel really accomplished now that I have finished, because I am glad I trained my computer to do something! After all, it's one little step closer to a future in Artificial Intelligence! I am super excited to begin my next project. I wonder what it will be!
 |
| This image is not from my Make Me Happy project, it is only an example of bins. The faces above are from my project, though. I think it's really amazing what AI can do. |
 |
| Scratch blocks: Just to give an example of what Scratch is like! |
No comments:
Post a Comment