AI MATTERS, VOLUME 5, ISSUE 4 DECEMBER 2019

Artificial Intelligence for All Using R Programming LanguageSharad Sinha (Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Goa; sharad@iitgoa.ac.in)Clint P. George (Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Goa; clint@iitgoa.ac.in)DOI: 10.1145/3375637.3375642

Introduction

This article describes a public event, specifi-cally a workshop, conducted by the authors tocreate awareness about Artificial Intelligenceamong high school students in the town ofPonda in the state of Goa, India. This eventwas funded by the ACM SIGAI AI ActivitiesFund and hence this article describes theevent, its impact and follow up actions that theauthors are engaged in.

The workshop was titled “Artificial Intelli-gence for All using R Programming Lan-guage” and was conducted on August 31,2019. A total of forty (40) high school studentsbelonging to Class XI in six schools in Pondaattended the workshop alongwith their teach-ers. The workshop was split into morning andafternoon sessions. The workshop was inau-gurated by Prof. B K Mishra, Director of IITGoa where he emphasized the need for earlyawareness among high school students aboutlatest developments in science and technol-ogy, especially disruptive technologies like Ar-tificial Intelligence. The morning session in-cluded one talk each by the authors and theafternoon session included hands-on exer-cises for students and their teachers to learnabout a basic practical way of carrying out ar-tificial intelligence related experiments usingcomputers.

The six schools which attended the workshopwere:

• The Kamakshi Education Society’s HigherSecondary School, Curti- Ponda

• G.V.M.’s S.N.J.A. Higher Secondary School,Farmagudi, Ponda

• S.S.Samiti’s S.A.M.D. Higher SecondarySchool of Science, Kavlem, Ponda

• G.V.M.’s Adarsh Higher Secondary School,Dr. Dada Vidya Sankul, Ponda

• Swami Vivekanand Vidyaprasarak Mandal’sHigher Secondary School, Bori, Ponda

Copyright c© 2019 by the author(s).

• P.E.S. S.R.S.N. Higher Secondary School,Farmagudi, Ponda

The authors had prepared an “Artificial In-telligence (AI) Storybook”, copies of whichwere made available to the participants. Allparticipants were also given certificates of par-ticipation.

Forenoon Session: Technical Talks

Both the authors conducted a technical talkeach. In the first such talk, the students wereintroduced to the very basic idea of artificial in-telligence (AI). This session started with news-paper reports about AI related initiatives in In-dia and the world, with specific examples fromthe fields of agriculture (smartphone based AIapp for pest control) and smart traffic lights.Thereafter, the students were introduced tothe basic idea of intelligence with a rudimen-tary classification that the first author came upwith: analytical intelligence, emotional intelli-gence, moral and social intelligence. Videoexamples of a robot learning to flip pancakesand a car that parks itself were shared withthe participants to excite them about the realworld possibilities of AI. Figure 1 shows theparticipants before the beginning of the tech-nical talks.

Figure 1: Students, teachers and authors duringtechnical talks

The history of the development of machines

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is exciting. Hence, the historical develop-ment from the six classical machines (wedge,ramp, wheel, lever, screwdriver and pulley) tomodern machines that can play games likeGo and defeat human players, was traced.This helped students appreciate how the sci-ence and technology behind modern artificialintelligence based machines has developedbecause of inventions of programming lan-guages, silicon transistors, integrated circuitsand developments in mathematics of learningmachines. Considering that the participantswere primarily high school students, the tech-nical interactive session was planned basedon inputs from their teachers regarding theirlevel of understanding of computers, program-ming, science and technology. The studentswere also introduced to the role played in arti-ficial intelligence by the voluminous amount ofdata being generated these days.

The second technical talk was delivered by thesecond author. He began with a very sim-ple example of recognition of basic geomet-rical shapes like circle, square etc. This wasfollowed by a very gentle introduction to su-pervised and unsupervised learning, with agreater emphasis on supervised learning. TheIris dataset (Dua & Graff, 2017) was used tobriefly introduce them to the task of automati-cally classifying iris flowers.

Afternoon Session: Hands-onExercises

The afternoon session was conducted by boththe authors with the help of their doctoral stu-dents. In this session, the students wereintroduced to very basic programming usingR language. They were then introduced tothe concept of datasets and their importance.The participants learned how to look for anddownload datasets. With the example of pre-downloaded iris dataset, they were taughtstep-by-step how to write code in R languageto use the dataset to create a simple modelto classify iris flowers. The concept of fea-tures of an object was introduced using thisdataset - highlighting that the sepal and thepetal lengths can be considered as object fea-tures which can help in clustering of iris flow-ers of similar dimensions. The hands-on ex-ercises were conducted for 2.5 hours with asmall break in between. Since the participants

were just learning to code in their school cur-riculum, a good amount of time was spent inmaking them familiar with the basics of R pro-gramming language as relevant to the hands-on exercises. Figure 2 shows the participantsduring the hands-on session.

Figure 2: Students, teachers and authors duringhands-on lab session

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Storybook

The authors had prepared an AI storybookthat has two parts: the first part is a conversa-tion between a boy and a girl on what is artifi-cial intelligence. Written in a colloquial style, itwas aimed at generating interest in the read-ers. The second part introduced supervisedlearning and k-nearest neighbor classification.Minimal mathematics was used to convey thegist of these two concepts. However, this partwas more technical than the first part.

The authors were motivated with the idea ofmaking the storybook accessible to multiplepeople in a house: students, their parents andperhaps grandparents. Hence, the first partwas a conversation style discussion. The firstpart was also translated into Hindi, again withthe help of Google translate followed by man-ual copyediting, to make this part accessibleto grandparents many of who may not speakor read English fluently. Hindi is a languagethat is widely understood in Goa and in In-dia. The storybook is available from th web-sites of the authors for download by anyonein the world. Figure 3 shows the participantswith the AI Storybook.

Feedback and Closing Session

At the end of the hands-on exercises, all theparticipants were given participation certifi-

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Figure 3: Students and teachers with the AI Story-book

cates and printed copies of the AI storybook.The students and the teachers very much ap-preciated the workshop and mentioned thatthey felt excited to learn more about this topic.A few of the schools also invited the authorsto interact with their students on this subject.All of them expressed a desire to make the softcopy of the storybook available to them so thatthey could share with all the students in theirschools. Figure 4 shows one of the participantgroups with the authors.

Figure 4: A student group with the authors duringclosing session

Post Workshop Follow up & MediaCoverage

The authors have already visited S.S.Samiti’sS.A.M.D. Higher Secondary School of Sci-ence, Kavlem on 26 September 2019 to inter-act with students from classes XI and XII onthe topic of artificial intelligence. During thisinteraction, the authors also emphasized onlearning basic mathematics and programming

and answered questions on careers and ed-ucation in computer science and engineering.Figure 5 shows the authors with the studentsduring the interaction session.

Figure 5: Authors with students and teachers dur-ing the interaction at S.S.Samiti’s S.A.M.D. HigherSecondary School of Science, Kavlem

The workshop was also highlighted as a majornews item in the Times of India, a prominentEnglish newspaper in India. The news item isaccessible at: http://tiny.cc/r96eez

Acknowledgments The authors would liketo acknowledge ACM SIGAI for supportingthis activity under the ACM SIGAI AI Activi-ties Fund. The enthusiastic engagement ofdoctoral students Prachi Kashikar, AbhilashaGupta, Sanket Shet and Prof. Rajesh PrabhuGaonkar was instrumental to the success ofthis workshop.

References

Dua, D., & Graff, C. (2017). UCI ma-chine learning repository. Retrieved fromhttp://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml

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Sharad Sinha is anAssistant Professor in theSchool of Mathematicsand Computer Scienceat IIT Goa. He receivedPhD degree (2014) inComputer Engineeringfrom NTU, Singapore andB.Tech degree (2007) inElectronics and Commu-

nicaiton Engineering from CUSAT, India. Heis an Associate Editor of ACM Ubiquity andIEEE Potentials magazines and is very activein engaging with schools and educationalinstitutions in promoting computer scienceand engineering education. His researchand teaching interests are in computer ar-chitecture, computing system design formachine and deep learning, reconfigurablecomputing, computer security and assistivetechnologies. He has received a Best PaperAward at ICCAD 2017 and a Best PaperAward nomination at CASES 2018 for hisresearch work.

Clint George is an As-sistant Professor in theSchool of Mathematicsand Computer Science atIIT Goa. He was pre-viously a postdoc at theInformatics Institute andDepartment of Statistics,University of Florida withDr. George Michailidis.He received Ph.D. andM.S. degrees from theDepartment of Computer

and Information Science and Engineering,University of Florida and completed B. Tech.in Computer Science and Engineering fromthe College of Engineering, Trivandrum, India.His teaching and research interests are in theareas of machine learning and applied statis-tics, including topic models, empirical Bayesmethods, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MMC)methods etc.

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