AI4ALL

My Journey with AI4ALL

During my second semester as a computer science student in spring 2023, I jumped into this awesome opportunity as a College Pathways Participant in the AI4ALL program.

I dove deep into the world of AI, learning about all sorts of cool applications and the nitty-gritty technical stuff. Machine learning, gradient descent, neural networks. But it wasn't just about the tech. We also got into the ethical side of things, looking at the implications of data processing and AI implementation. Thinking about the bigger picture.

The highlight was definitely our machine learning project. We were trying to detect fake news using logistic regression, which sounds fancy but was actually super interesting. We used this dataset of labeled news articles (labeled as real or fake) and trained a model to figure out if an article was fake or real. It was like teaching a computer to be a fact-checker!

This involved cleaning up the data from Kaggle.com, which meant getting rid of punctuation, making everything lowercase, and removing "stopwords" (those are the really common words that don't add much meaning). Then we used a good old TF-IDF vectorization to turn all that text into numbers that the computer could understand.

We split our data into training and testing sets, and then we checked how well our model did. It had an accuracy of 0.968! The whole project was eye-opening. We weren't just playing around with code; we were doing real research into how AI could impact the news industry. It showed me how machine learning could actually help fight the spread of fake news.

By the end of it all, I had earned my Discover AI Certificate of Completion. But more than that, I came away with a whole new perspective on AI and its potential to make a real difference in the world. It was an exhausting ride, and I loved every minute of it.

You can check more on my GitHub.