Break Through Tech’s AI program —which spans NYC, LA, Boston, and which is available virtually for students outside those regions — helps college women and nonbinary students gain the skills and build the portfolios they need to better prepare them to secure jobs in the fastest-growing areas of tech: data science, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly for Black, Latina, Indigenous, low-income, first-generation, and other marginalized communities, the barriers to entering AI loom large. We are here to change that.
Published
03/10/2023
Break Through Tech’s AI program —which spans NYC, LA, Boston, and which is available virtually for students outside those regions — helps college women and nonbinary students gain the skills and build the portfolios they need to better prepare them to secure jobs in the fastest-growing areas of tech: data science, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly for Black, Latina, Indigenous, low-income, first-generation, and other marginalized communities, the barriers to entering AI loom large. We are here to change that.
AI Studio, a cornerstone of our AI program, is an experiential learning opportunity that provides students with the chance to work on real-world ML challenges presented by our industry partners in the corporate, public sector, and nonprofit worlds— from product recommendations to sentiment analysis, language modeling, and time series forecasting. Here are some examples of projects the students worked on during Fall 2022 AI Studio:
- For Pfizer, students built a predictive algorithm for future COVID-19 detection using NLP and clustering techniques.
- Analyzed open-source Twitter data for Accenture to identify public reaction and sentiment around a product release
- Predicted the arrival probability of customers on the American Express web portal
- Predicted for Verizon how much additional network coverage and capacity are needed given expanding network demand and movement.
- For USA for UNHCR, a nonprofit organization that helps to save, protect and rebuild the lives of millions of refugees, used email data to predict which supporters are likely to convert to donors
- Designed a model for KPMG that predicts how best to electrify our roads and communities to encourage balanced growth across Chicago.
Our industry partners benefit from participating in the AI Studio program in a range of ways; from getting fresh perspectives on ML products or tools, to bolstering talent recruitment efforts by attracting and engaging skilled and diverse students who could be future employees. Hear what our Challenge Advisors from USA for UNHCR shared about their experience with the AI Studio last year, here.
We’re looking for corporate, public sector, and nonprofit partners to provide our students with real-world challenges they can work on during Fall 2023 AI Studio from August-December.
Here’s what’s involved in being an AI Studio industry partner:
- Identify a Challenge Advisor. Challenge Advisors are technical experts who can come up with a challenge and guide students as they make progress on their AI Studio project.
- Submit an AI Studio Challenge. Challenges should be similar in scope to a summer internship project and include a relevant dataset in the public domain.
- Meet with students every 2 weeks from mid-August to mid-December. During check-ins, Challenge Advisors help students get unstuck and share technical feedback.
- Invite colleagues to attend the final presentation. Students will present their AI Studio projects at the end of the semester to an audience convened by their Challenge Advisor.
Given the pace of growth in AI and its sweeping social impact, if you only have time to do one more thing to accelerate your diversity efforts this year, submitting a challenge for our students should be that thing.
Other stories you may be interested in: