Team Thursday #3 — ACM AI’s Stone Tao
ACM AI is a community focused on building an AI community, helping guide the next generation of aspiring AI engineers, scientists and more! We are member focused and work towards improving the accessibility to the field of AI through workshops, fun competitions and tons of other events. Introducing ACM AI’s very own president, Stone Tao for our third Team Thursday!
Q: Pitch ACM AI!
Stone: Do you like AI or want to broaden your knowledge and get involved? Do you want to learn how the best players in go, chess, get defeated by a few files of code? Or do you dislike AI but want to create something intelligent to mess with your friends? Join ACM AI!
Stone: Besides endless memes and fun AI content, we are also working on providing serious content, talks, and starting our AI project team system where we mentors experienced in relevant fields of AI like computer vision, NLP, RL, and more to help you build a full blown AI based project and guide you through the process of making one!
Q: What’s ACM AI up to now?
Stone: Every quarter we typically have a workshop theme, this quarter being Reinforcement Learning! We also are about to run our accompanying RL competition using the popular Open AI gym.
Q: What is something that you are looking forward to this quarter?
Stone: Looking forward to meeting all the new people coming to our AI community as well as helping launch our first quarter of AI project teams!
Q: Why did you want to start this community?
Stone: From discussion with other people in the ACM community, we felt that there was a bit of a lack of an organization that focuses on the nitty gritty AI. Yes there’s the data science orgs, some robotics orgs, and more that touch on AI, but not a deep, accessible enough level. Plus, we also believe it’s best to learn by doing, hence why we always run competitions to accompany workshops and what we teach, as well as project teams for people to apply their learned skills to learn even more advanced concepts and get something cool or important made!
Q: What is the randomest thing that you hope ACM AI can do in the future?
Stone: Build something stupid with AI. Like idk maybe a NLP model that reads the ACM discord chats and guesses what kind of boba you prefer. Or (a bit overkill) training an RL model that plays Cut Bread
if you don’t know what this is see this:
and gets near perfect bread cuts!
Q: What is something you see AI doing in the future?
Stone: Recently people have been pushing for AI that relies less on money and heavy training and model sizes, and looking for more creative solutions to many of the problems state of the art AI models are trying to solve. For example, GPT-3 is a super large language model, and one of the biggest factors in its success is due to how large it is! Like many researchers, I think the next big development in AI would be something that approaches topics like NLP in a different angle that is not bottlenecked by hardware and money.
Stone: Another big thing is the trends towards focusing on Ethics and AI, not AI. A lot of great work has been published on these topics and it’s also great to see current review committees for various AI research conferences requiring statements on how the research stays within ethical boundaries. I believe this will only become a bigger and bigger topic as the web of technology grows and our world becomes more and more digital and AI becomes more and more prevalent in our social lives.
Want to get to know more about the different communities in ACM? Join our discord: https://acmurl.com/discord.
You can also join the ACM AI discord to get updates on their latest events and projects here: https://acmurl.com/ai-disc
