atlanta society tagged interest

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - If artificial intelligence is the future, then it is already here, and today’s children will feel its effects more than anyone.

“This population group is uniquely positioned to have a seat at the table and a voice in the conversation,” said Calvin Lawrence, an engineer who runs the nonprofit AI for Black Kids.

“AI” is today’s hot-button topic. NVIDIA, which makes GPU chips for AI applications, surpassed Microsoft and Apple to become the world’s most valuable company on Tuesday. Private and public entities are finding more and more effective ways to use AI.

That includes police departments.

But AI is only as effective as the people working on it.

“We’re not just looking at AI,” Lawrence explained. “We’re looking at the data.”

AI models are only as good as the information they learn from. That information can be incorrect, biased, or malicious.

That’s what Lawrence’s four-week summer program for sixth- to eighth-graders at Atlanta Metropolitan State College is about: the data of facial recognition and predictive policing, the biases involved, and how to avoid them.

“How is that done?” Lawrence asked rhetorically. “How do you build that system? What is a neural network?”

It’s a program that introduces children of color to a topic that’s everywhere.

“We already use it in more than 90% of our stuff today,” said student Elijah Bell.

Bell and most of the program’s students are more familiar with AI than older generations because they’re more tech-savvy. Even so, the workload required to make those programs function can be overwhelming.

“You need to give it specific instructions,” Bell explained. “You need to code it to do what you want.”

Lawrence, despite extensive work with AI and predictive policing, was taken aback by how quickly the kids grasped the principles behind AI.

“I was surprised that they understood the concepts of things like facial recognition and predictive policing,” he said.

That’s a good surprise. Lawrence believes that adding voices of color to the data input can one day help provide AI programs the ability to learn more well-rounded policing techniques, avoiding the pitfalls of stereotyping and racism while still being an effective investigative tool for police departments.

“We believe that AI bias is mostly a cultural concern,” Lawrence said.