STAI CDT PhD student Nathan Gavenski (2022 cohort) took part in the recent King’s Festival of Artificial Intelligence with his demonstration, ‘Can you help me?’.
Nathan’s demo invited visitors to interact with Jade, an artificial intelligence, to help it to find its friend in photos. As part of this interactive experience, visitors were encouraged to learn more about how neural networks work, the problems with overfitting, bias and how these problems impact fairness in today’s systems. As we grow more reliant on AI systems, this demo emphasized the importance of being able to understand such systems and aimed to inspire visitors to be invested in bias fairness issues in AI.
A real highlight of the demo for Nathan was the huge range of conversations he had about AI. Nathan says, “I had a blast talking to soo many different people, from children to adults (with many backgrounds — there were researchers, journalists and even people from computer science). I was surprised to ask kids if they knew what AI and neural networks were, and many of them gave me accurate answers. They knew what AI was and could give me examples of where it was being used and even tell me about ChatGPT… I also had the pleasure of talking to many other adults about recent problems with AI, how we can help researchers, and what troubles we face when researching healthcare-related topics.”
The demo also allowed Nathan to pass on some career advice to younger students. As Nathan says, “During that day, some high schoolers came to my stand, and we talked about studying computer science, what was important to know about AI and how I got into the field, which was great.”
For Nathan, the public engagement aspect of the demo was fulfilling and inspiring. He says, “I had a fantastic time and would love to be part of these experiences in the future. It was motivating for me to talk about my research and teach about my field. Even though it was exhausting, and I had to talk non-stop throughout the day, I left King’s with more energy than when I got in. Ready to write my thesis and do research!”
You can read more about his demo here. We also encourage you to visit King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s exhibition, Bringing the Human to the Artificial, which runs until 30 June in the Arcade at Bush House and highlights AI across King’s College London.