DMZ 2022 — The Coding Hive

The Coding Hive was invited this summer to facilitate the “Introduction to AI” workshops for two amazing programs organized by the DMZ at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Basecamp 2022

DMZ Basecamp is an 8-week intensive student incubation program that helps young entrepreneurs create tech solutions to growing social or economic gaps in society.

At Basecamp, students tap into their potential and learn how to develop and market business ideas with the help of other young innovators, industry mentors and successful entrepreneurs. This is an opportunity for students to start real companies and gain experiential learning opportunities to apply what they’ve learnt and solved the world’s biggest problems.

SHAD 2022

Shad is a month-long program for grade 10 & 11s. Pan-Canadian classrooms with university level STEAM and entrepreneurship content and access to mentors. This year’s program included over 50 students from all over Canada! The Shad experience at every campus includes an immersive program of lectures, workshops, projects and activities that builds on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts & math).

The Coding Hive facilitated two-day workshops for each of the above programs that were curated to introduce the young entrepreneurs to various concepts in Artificial Intelligence. The program started by introducing the students to a wide range of AI applications with focus on applications developed by Canadian startups.

The program included multiple hands-on coding activities that provided the students with the opportunity to develop and present simple AI applications in object detection and text classifications. The majority of the students did not have previous coding experience. The code-along sessions walked the students through the python code, explaining how to apply various packages (Detecto and FastText) on the available datasets. The object detection model was trained to detect various objects in videos that they took; while the text classifier was used to classify categories from wikipedia page descriptions. In addition, the workshops provided an overview of the theories behind the machine learning algorithms used such as deep learning and random forest.

A sample of an object detection model applied on a video that a student captured in class

The students demoing the models they worked on during the workshop

Guest speakers from different domains in Data Science were invited to speak to the students about the paths they took to get into the data science field. The guest speakers also went over the latest projects they are working on and how they apply machine learning to solve complex challenges in healthcare, banking and technology.