AI, student and big prizes: how to do machine learning in 8th grade
Hi, Habr!
We want to talk about such an unusual form of earnings for teenagers, like participation in hackathons. This is financially beneficial, and allows in practice to apply the knowledge gained in school and through reading smart books.
A simple example is last year's hackathon of the Academy of Artificial Intelligence for schoolchildren. Its participants had to predict the outcome of the game Dota 2. The winner of the competition then became Alexander Mamaev - a tenth-grader from Chelyabinsk. His algorithm most accurately identified the team winner of the fight. Due to this, Alexander received a solid prize - 100 thousand rubles.
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How Alexander Mamaev ordered the prizes, what knowledge the student lacks to work with ML, and which direction in the field of AI he considers most interesting - the student told in an interview.
- Tell me about yourself, how did you get into AI? Was it difficult to enter the topic?
- I am 17 years old, I’m finishing school this year, and recently I moved from Chelyabinsk to Dolgoprudny, this is near Moscow. I study at the Fiztech Lyceum named after Kapitsa, this is one of the best schools in the Moscow region. I could rent an apartment, but I live in a boarding school at a school, so it’s better and easier to communicate with people from the lyceum.
For the first time I heard about AI and ML in the year 2016 probably when Prisma appeared. Then I was in the 8th grade and was engaged in Olympiad programming, attended some Olympiads and found out that MLs are held in our city. It was interesting for me to figure it out, to understand how it works, and I started going there. There I learned the basics for the first time, then I began to study it further on the Internet, at various courses.
At first, in Russian, there was only a course from Konstantin Vorontsov, and the manner of his teaching is hard: it contains many terms, and there are many formulas in the descriptions. It was very difficult for an eighth-grader, but now, just because I went through such a school at the beginning, the terms do not present difficulties for me to practice in real-world problems.
- How much do you need to know mathematics to work with AI? Knowledge of the school program is enough?
- In many ways, ML is based on the basic concepts of school 10-11 class, basic linear algebra and differentiation. If we are talking about production, about technical problems, then in many respects mathematics is not needed there, many problems are solved trivially by trial and error. But if we talk about research, when new technologies are created, then there is nowhere without mathematics. Mathematics is needed at a basic level, if only to know how to make an application of a matrix or, conditionally speaking, consider derivatives. From mathematics is not to leave.
- In your opinion, can any student with a naturally analytical mindset solve problems in ML?
- Yes. If a person knows what ML is based on, if he knows how the data is organized and understands basic tricks or hacks, he will not need a matan, because many tools for work are already written by other people. It all comes down to finding patterns. But all, of course, depends on the task.
- What is the most difficult in solving ML problems and cases?
- Each new task is something new. If the task already existed earlier in the same form, it would not have to be solved. There is no universal algorithm. There is a huge community of people who train their skills in problem solving, tell how they solved problems, describe the history of their victories. And it is very interesting to follow their logic, their ideas.
- What cases and tasks are you most interested in solving?
- I specialize in computational linguistics, I am interested in texts, classification tasks, chat bots and more.
- Do you often participate in AI hackathons?
- Hackatons are, in fact, a different system of Olympiads. In the competition there is a set of closed problems, with well-known answers that the participant must guess. But there are people who are not strong in closed tasks, but tear everyone into open ones. So you can test knowledge in different ways. In open problems, technologies are sometimes created from scratch, products are quickly developed, and even the organizers often do not know the correct answer. We often participate in hackathons, thanks to which we can earn. It is interesting.
- How much can you earn on this? And how do you spend the prize money?
- My friend and I participated in the VKontakte hackathon, where we made an application to search for paintings at the Hermitage. On the screen of the phone, a set of Emodji, emoticons was highlighted, it was necessary to find a picture for this set, the phone was aimed at the picture, it was recognized with the help of neural networks and, in case of the correct answer, points were added. It was pleasant and interesting to us that we managed to make an application that allowed us to recognize a picture on a mobile device. We went first in the first place, but because of a legal formality, we flew past the prize of 500 thousand rubles. It's a shame, but this is not important.
In addition, he participated in the competitions of Sberbank Data Science Journey, where he took the 5th place and earned 200 thousand rubles. For the first there paid a million, for the second 500 thousand. Prize funds are different, now they are increasing. Being in the top, you can get 100 to 500 thousand. I save the prize money on training, this is my contribution to the future, the money I spend in everyday life, I earn myself.
- What is more interesting - individual or team hackathons?
- If we are talking about the development of a product, then this should be a team, one person cannot do it. He trite tired, need support. But if we are talking, for example, about the hackathon of the AI Academy, then the task is limited there, no need to create a product. There is interest in another - overtake another person who also develops in this area.
- How do you plan to develop further? What is your career like?
- Now the main goal is to prepare our serious scientific work, research, so that it appears at the leading conferences like NeurIPS or ICML conferences on ML, which take place in different countries of the world. Career question is open, see how ML is developing over the past 5 years. It is changing rapidly, it is difficult to predict what will happen next. And if we talk about ideas and plans in addition to scientific work, then perhaps I would see myself in some kind of my own project, a startup in the field of AI and ML, but this is not certain.
- In your opinion, what limitations does AI have?
- Well, in general, if we talk about AI as a thing that has some kind of intelligence, it processes the data, then, in the near future, this is some kind of awareness of the world around us. If we are talking about neural networks in computational linguistics, for example, we are trying to locally model something, for example, language, without giving the model an understanding of the context of our world. That is, if we are able to lay it in the AI, we will be able to create interactive models, chat bots, which will not only know the language models, but will also have an outlook, know the scientific facts. And I would like to see this in the future.
By the way, the Academy of Artificial Intelligence is now recruiting students for a new hackathon. The prizes are also solid, and the task this year is even more interesting - you will need to build an algorithm that predicts the player’s experience on the basis of Dota 2 single match statistics. For details, follow this link .
We want to talk about such an unusual form of earnings for teenagers, like participation in hackathons. This is financially beneficial, and allows in practice to apply the knowledge gained in school and through reading smart books.
A simple example is last year's hackathon of the Academy of Artificial Intelligence for schoolchildren. Its participants had to predict the outcome of the game Dota 2. The winner of the competition then became Alexander Mamaev - a tenth-grader from Chelyabinsk. His algorithm most accurately identified the team winner of the fight. Due to this, Alexander received a solid prize - 100 thousand rubles.
')
How Alexander Mamaev ordered the prizes, what knowledge the student lacks to work with ML, and which direction in the field of AI he considers most interesting - the student told in an interview.
- Tell me about yourself, how did you get into AI? Was it difficult to enter the topic?
- I am 17 years old, I’m finishing school this year, and recently I moved from Chelyabinsk to Dolgoprudny, this is near Moscow. I study at the Fiztech Lyceum named after Kapitsa, this is one of the best schools in the Moscow region. I could rent an apartment, but I live in a boarding school at a school, so it’s better and easier to communicate with people from the lyceum.
For the first time I heard about AI and ML in the year 2016 probably when Prisma appeared. Then I was in the 8th grade and was engaged in Olympiad programming, attended some Olympiads and found out that MLs are held in our city. It was interesting for me to figure it out, to understand how it works, and I started going there. There I learned the basics for the first time, then I began to study it further on the Internet, at various courses.
At first, in Russian, there was only a course from Konstantin Vorontsov, and the manner of his teaching is hard: it contains many terms, and there are many formulas in the descriptions. It was very difficult for an eighth-grader, but now, just because I went through such a school at the beginning, the terms do not present difficulties for me to practice in real-world problems.
- How much do you need to know mathematics to work with AI? Knowledge of the school program is enough?
- In many ways, ML is based on the basic concepts of school 10-11 class, basic linear algebra and differentiation. If we are talking about production, about technical problems, then in many respects mathematics is not needed there, many problems are solved trivially by trial and error. But if we talk about research, when new technologies are created, then there is nowhere without mathematics. Mathematics is needed at a basic level, if only to know how to make an application of a matrix or, conditionally speaking, consider derivatives. From mathematics is not to leave.
- In your opinion, can any student with a naturally analytical mindset solve problems in ML?
- Yes. If a person knows what ML is based on, if he knows how the data is organized and understands basic tricks or hacks, he will not need a matan, because many tools for work are already written by other people. It all comes down to finding patterns. But all, of course, depends on the task.
- What is the most difficult in solving ML problems and cases?
- Each new task is something new. If the task already existed earlier in the same form, it would not have to be solved. There is no universal algorithm. There is a huge community of people who train their skills in problem solving, tell how they solved problems, describe the history of their victories. And it is very interesting to follow their logic, their ideas.
- What cases and tasks are you most interested in solving?
- I specialize in computational linguistics, I am interested in texts, classification tasks, chat bots and more.
- Do you often participate in AI hackathons?
- Hackatons are, in fact, a different system of Olympiads. In the competition there is a set of closed problems, with well-known answers that the participant must guess. But there are people who are not strong in closed tasks, but tear everyone into open ones. So you can test knowledge in different ways. In open problems, technologies are sometimes created from scratch, products are quickly developed, and even the organizers often do not know the correct answer. We often participate in hackathons, thanks to which we can earn. It is interesting.
- How much can you earn on this? And how do you spend the prize money?
- My friend and I participated in the VKontakte hackathon, where we made an application to search for paintings at the Hermitage. On the screen of the phone, a set of Emodji, emoticons was highlighted, it was necessary to find a picture for this set, the phone was aimed at the picture, it was recognized with the help of neural networks and, in case of the correct answer, points were added. It was pleasant and interesting to us that we managed to make an application that allowed us to recognize a picture on a mobile device. We went first in the first place, but because of a legal formality, we flew past the prize of 500 thousand rubles. It's a shame, but this is not important.
In addition, he participated in the competitions of Sberbank Data Science Journey, where he took the 5th place and earned 200 thousand rubles. For the first there paid a million, for the second 500 thousand. Prize funds are different, now they are increasing. Being in the top, you can get 100 to 500 thousand. I save the prize money on training, this is my contribution to the future, the money I spend in everyday life, I earn myself.
- What is more interesting - individual or team hackathons?
- If we are talking about the development of a product, then this should be a team, one person cannot do it. He trite tired, need support. But if we are talking, for example, about the hackathon of the AI Academy, then the task is limited there, no need to create a product. There is interest in another - overtake another person who also develops in this area.
- How do you plan to develop further? What is your career like?
- Now the main goal is to prepare our serious scientific work, research, so that it appears at the leading conferences like NeurIPS or ICML conferences on ML, which take place in different countries of the world. Career question is open, see how ML is developing over the past 5 years. It is changing rapidly, it is difficult to predict what will happen next. And if we talk about ideas and plans in addition to scientific work, then perhaps I would see myself in some kind of my own project, a startup in the field of AI and ML, but this is not certain.
- In your opinion, what limitations does AI have?
- Well, in general, if we talk about AI as a thing that has some kind of intelligence, it processes the data, then, in the near future, this is some kind of awareness of the world around us. If we are talking about neural networks in computational linguistics, for example, we are trying to locally model something, for example, language, without giving the model an understanding of the context of our world. That is, if we are able to lay it in the AI, we will be able to create interactive models, chat bots, which will not only know the language models, but will also have an outlook, know the scientific facts. And I would like to see this in the future.
By the way, the Academy of Artificial Intelligence is now recruiting students for a new hackathon. The prizes are also solid, and the task this year is even more interesting - you will need to build an algorithm that predicts the player’s experience on the basis of Dota 2 single match statistics. For details, follow this link .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/446660/
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