High school students apply AI knowledge in special AUS workshop

High school students took part in an educational and entertaining artificial intelligence (AI) workshop held recently at American University of Sharjah (AUS) where they engaged in a series of experiments and hands-on activities in data science, machine learning, neural networks and deep learning.

During the two-day event, 28 students from 13 schools explored new grounds of artificial intelligence and developed essential skills necessary for their future university life.

“Our aim was to give students an overall understanding of what artificial intelligence is, explain its significance and give them hands-on experiences in machine learning and neural networking programs. Artificial intelligence forms the basis for all computer learning and is the future of all complex decision making. It is a tool that enables people to rethink how we can integrate information and analyze data, and it has many applications we see in our daily life such as self-driving cars, smart assistants, manufacturing robots, social media monitoring and so many more.  This workshop served as an educational introduction to all that and more,” said Dr. Imran Zualkernan, Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and Interim Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

During the workshop, students developed many AI applications including programs that automatically detected the genre of a song, a dance pose or a facial expression.

The workshop concluded with two hackathons allowing students to apply the knowledge they gained from the workshop. In the first, students were asked to build a neural network that can distinguish between various yoga poses. In the second, students were asked to fine-tune a neural network for digit recognition to get the best performance.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the AUS College of Engineering offers a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering, a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, and a Master of Science in Computer Engineering.  The CSE curriculum focuses on artificial intelligence, data science and smart cities. AUS is ranked among the top three in the UAE and top ​500 universities globally for ​computer science and information systems, according to QS World University Subject Rankings (202​2​). 

For more information on the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, visit www.aus.edu/cen/bscoe.