Teenagers and Artificial Intelligence: Bootcamp Experience and Lessons Learned

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as a game-changer in today's technology landscape. However, the integration of AI education in classroom curricula currently lags behind, leaving teenagers inadequately prepared for an imminent AI-driven future. In this pilot study, we designed a three-day bootcamp offered in the summer of 2023 to a cohort of 60 high school students. The curriculum was delivered in person through animated video content, easy-to-follow slides, interactive playgrounds, and quizzes. These were packaged in the early version of an online learning platform we are developing. Results from the post-bootcamp survey conveyed a 91.4% overall satisfaction. Despite the short bootcamp duration, 88.5% and 71.4% of teenagers responded that they had an improved understanding of AI concepts and programming, respectively. Overall, we found that employing diverse modalities effectively engaged students, and building foundational modules proved beneficial for introducing more complex topics. Furthermore, using Google Colab notebooks for coding assignments proved challenging to most students. Students' activity on the platform and their answers to quizzes showed proficient engagement and a grasp of the material. Our results strongly highlight the need for compelling and accessible AI education methods for the next generation and the potential for informal learning to fill the gap of providing early AI education to teenagers.

Counterfactual Explanations for Support Vector Machine Models

We tackle the problem of computing counterfactual explanations -- minimal changes to the features that flip an undesirable model prediction. We propose a solution to this question for linear Support Vector Machine (SVMs) models. Moreover, we introduce a way to account for weighted actions that allow for more changes in certain features than others. In particular, we show how to find counterfactual explanations with the purpose of increasing model interpretability. These explanations are valid, change only actionable features, are close to the data distribution, sparse, and take into account correlations between features. We cast this as a mixed integer programming optimization problem. Additionally, we introduce two novel scale-invariant cost functions for assessing the quality of counterfactual explanations and use them to evaluate the quality of our approach with a real medical dataset. Finally, we build a support vector machine model to predict whether law students will pass the Bar exam using protected features, and used our algorithms to uncover the inherent biases of the SVM.

A Weighted Solution to SVM Actionability and Interpretability

Research in machine learning has successfully developed algorithms to build accurate classification models. However, in many real-world applications, such as healthcare, customer satisfaction, and environment protection, we want to be able to use the models to decide what actions to take. We investigate the concept of actionability in the context of Support Vector Machines. Actionability is as important as interpretability or explainability of machine learning models, an ongoing and important research topic. Actionability is the task that gives us ways to act upon machine learning models and their predictions. This paper finds a solution to the question of actionability on both linear and non-linear SVM models. Additionally, we introduce a way to account for weighted actions that allow for more change in certain features than others. We propose a gradient descent solution on the linear, RBF, and polynomial kernels, and we test the effectiveness of our models on both synthetic and real datasets. We are also able to explore the model's interpretability through the lens of actionability.

Using Kernel Methods and Model Selection for Prediction of Preterm Birth

We describe an application of machine learning to the problem of predicting preterm birth. We conduct a secondary analysis on a clinical trial dataset collected by the National In- stitute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) while focusing our attention on predicting different classes of preterm birth. We compare three approaches for deriving predictive models: a support vector machine (SVM) approach with linear and non-linear kernels, logistic regression with different model selection along with a model based on decision rules prescribed by physician experts for prediction of preterm birth. Our approach highlights the pre-processing methods applied to handle the inherent dynamics, noise and gaps in the data and describe techniques used to handle skewed class distributions. Empirical experiments demonstrate significant improvement in predicting preterm birth compared to past work.