Dates: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m, 07/24/2023 – 07/28/2023

Location: Soda Hall, UC Berkeley Campus

Housing: No on-campus housing available.

Food: Lunch is provided.

Program Tuition: $0 – AI4ALL is a scholarship program and not available for public purchase. Accepting applications until midnight April 10, 2023!

Our days begin with a guest lecturer, usually a UC Berkeley AI or Computer Science (CS)  professor, describing the research that they do with AI systems. These one-hour lectures usually focus on either providing a high-level overview of how certain AI systems work on a technical level and the problems they are trying to solve, or how those systems interact with society and social systems and the affordances, limitations, and deleterious outcomes of such interactions.

After these lectures and Q&A with the professors, we engage in a quick interactive and kinesthetic activity related to the day’s learning objectives that also gets us on our feet and engaging socially with one another. Afterward, we engage in a participatory lecture: that is, a lecture that is broken into smaller pieces with individual and group tasks interspersed to provide opportunities to engage with the content being lectured about.

These participatory lectures cover the basics of the pertinent AI concepts that are foundational to the project work aspects of the program. After this work, we take an hour break for lunch and socialization; sometimes graduate and undergraduate students join us to mingle and talk with us about studying AI and CS at the college level.

Upon returning from lunch, we turn our attention to either: (1) foundational technical skill development or (2) project work. That is, earlier in the week, most afternoons are spent on introductory Python programming knowledge, hands-on experience developing machine-learning models, and building an understanding of mathematical concepts underlying AI systems.

Later in the week, these skills and knowledge sets are applied to real-world AI problems under the mentorship of AI graduate students. Participants will also visit robotics labs that focus on human-compatible AI and will meet with the respective faculty and graduate students in those labs.

UC Berkeley AI graduate students will teach the course, and there will be guest lectures from multiple AI and computer science (CS) faculty.

Tim Hurt is a science curriculum developer and researcher at the Lawrence Hall of Science. He has been an educator for the past 10 years, has experience teaching all grades K–12, and has led UC Berkeley’s AI4ALL since 2019. He has developed curricula for grades K–12 with materials covering physics, engineering, and space science. He currently works on projects related to developing and researching AI exhibits for the Lawrence Hall of Science museum floor. Tim has an undergraduate degree in Physics from University of California, Berkeley, and a Masters in Information and Data Science from University of California, Berkeley.