Students revive Artificial Intelligence club

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) club was founded three years ago by three alumni: Keshav Narayan and Mayank Pandey, both from the Class of 2017, and Aayush Gupta, from the Class of 2016.

Their goal was to educate members on various topics such as reinforcement learning for games, one of many areas of specialty in the emerging field.

“We thought that Computer Science club was too restricted to algorithms and more theoretical concepts,” Pandey said, “so it made sense for there to exist something that did this stuff.”

Since its founding, the club’s focus has shifted from a solely lecture-based setting to a more interactive one. Several weeks ago, the officers of the club, president Arian Raje and vice president  Christina Xiao, led members in a project involving heart disease. The project tried to predict the likelihood of a patient developing cardiac illnesses based on having certain characteristics.

This shift in methodology has led to a revived interest in the club. In its early years, the club consisted of approximately 10 members, whereas now, around 15 people regularly show up in computer science teacher Thomas Wang’s room for meetings at lunch on Fridays.

Both officers of the club became interested in artificial intelligence after attending summer programs. Xiao, a junior, attended the MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute, a program concerning new technologies in engineering fields, where she took a course on artificial intelligence and cognitive learning.

Raje, a senior, participated in bioinformatics research at UC Irvine and is now working in the Kundaje Lab of Stanford Medical School. He works on models to predict the interactions between proteins and the substructures that are likely to be involved.

The two want to spread knowledge about AI because it’s such a hot area. According to Raje, almost every major technology company is employing it to some degree. Currently, Raje plans on majoring in computer science in college, while still working on AI-related projects.

Although the club is still relatively new, its future is uncertain. They have begun hopping from project to project that they feel is interesting, such as facial recognition or bioinformatics.

“We might start introducing more difficult projects, maybe projects that can be used in machine learning competitions right now,” Raje said.

The officers hope that other members of their club will take inspiration from the projects they are introduced to and learn to apply these skills to projects of their own.

“I really hope the club gains traction, though I am not really sure what to expect,” Raje said. “But I definitely think we’re more proactive in trying to structure projects than in the past, so hopefully that will help us.”