Week 1: Syllabus & Orientation

Week 1

I just finished a fulfilling first week for the OpenAI Scholars program. Here’s a sweet pic of our time in the office:

Going into the office and speaking with the folks working there really helped me change the way I think about the work I will be doing. They all set a benchmark for the depth of knowledge I am seeking to attain in this field. I also learned from speaking to fellow cohort members. They all have such varied backgrounds, so hearing their project ideas helped me understand different possibilities within the realm of AI, and helped me think of new ways I could utilize AI for others.

I seek to utilize AI to create resources for other people. I believe the most powerful thing is when people are able to help other people. People strive to help each other, but are not always able to due to circumstances out of their control. With advances in AI, computers are now able to do a lot of things people can, and sometimes they can do those things better! I wish to use AI to provide people with resources they don’t have access to that they previously needed another person to provide, all for the free!

To come closer to this goal, I will be studying Natural Language Processing during Scholar’s program since people interact with each other using language. I want to develop a system that’s responsive to human needs, so I will also be studying Reinforcement Learning. In this age of big-data, we have access to more unlabelled text data than we know what to do with, so to develop a system to take advantage of this abundance I will also study Unsupervised Learning.

My goal for my project is to understand recent developments in natural language understanding and question answering systems to contribute a new development, and to deploy this project on the web for people to use. I’m excited to share my progress as time passes. In the mean time, here’s my syllabus for the next few months.