I gave the keynote address at Byte Sized, a workshop for middle school girls spearheaded by SAIL ON students. My First AI (or: Decision Trees & Language Modeling for Middle Schoolers) solidified the basics of artificial intelligence and the if/else statements taught the previous day.
The talk introduces the language identification problem within AI, teaches about decision trees, and then asks students to write decision trees in small groups to distinguish between Hmong, Balinese, Zulu, and other languages. After a debrief on why computers are might be more effective than human-written rules, it briefly ties in themes of feature extraction and gradient descent via GBMs.