For the past 10 months, Chelsea Prudencio, a junior at Baruch College in Manhattan, has taken a crash course in artificial intelligence through a new program for young, low-income, Latina, and Black women majoring in computing.
As part of a program called “Break Through Tech AI,” Ms. Prudencio completed an intensive class developed with input from several Cornell faculty. She threw herself into a student AI project at Pfizer that created a heart disease prediction model. She also received guidance from a cybersecurity executive at Citigroup on how to ace interviews for technical positions.
These are important learning and career opportunities that can help computing majors land jobs in rapidly changing fields like AI and data science. But students like Prudencio, who attend public universities not known for their top-notch computing programs, often face difficulties accessing them.
Prudencio, 20, who works part-time at a tennis center, said, “I didn’t know anything about HealthTech until the project with Pfizer started.” Now, she wants to pursue a career in the field of medical AI. She said: “Personally, I think this is very rewarding because she is building a model that has the potential to save lives.”
Break Through Tech is at the forefront of university-led efforts to reduce barriers to technology careers for underrepresented college students, including low-income, Latinx, and Black young women. The new AI program, the largest of its kind in the U.S., will favor wealthy students from top universities with hiring criteria such as technical interviews, winning hackathons, internal employee references and past internships. It takes a novel approach in the often crowded technology industry. The aim is to help students from low-income families, many of whom work part-time in addition to their studies, learn AI skills, build industry connections and participate in research projects that can be discussed with recruiters.
Sponsored and supported by MIT, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Cornell Tech, this AI program is free. And this is primarily aimed at students attending public institutions, such as California State University, City University of New York, campuses of the University of Massachusetts System, or minority-serving institutions, such as historically black colleges and universities.
Participants will take an online summer course on AI Systems where they will learn the basics of machine learning: how to detect patterns in datasets. Students who receive a $2,000 scholarship will also be assigned a career mentor from an institution such as Columbia University or Accenture. They are working on student AI challenges set by employers such as Google, JPMorgan Chase, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
This year, students developed an AI model to distinguish tens of thousands of digitized images of plant specimens belonging to the New York Botanical Garden, one of the world’s premier plant collections, from other types of images, including: I also participated in a semester-long competition. Insect photo. The winning model achieved an accuracy of over 99%. Emily Sessa, the garden’s herbarium director, said the students’ research could ultimately help botanists more effectively track the effects of climate change on specific plants over time. .
“I loved working on code and seeing the results,” said Sabreen Sigli, a computer engineering major at Stony Brook University on Long Island. Her student team was called the Foxgloves, and she took third place in the competition. “She thought it would be great to be able to use AI to help the environment,” she said.
A few weeks ago, 150 students who had just completed the AI program visited the Bronx Botanical Garden for a graduation event that included a scavenger hunt to find real flora and fauna. One of them was Salih Demir, 20, a fourth-year student at the New York Institute of Technology on Long Island.
“I came in with very little experience,” Demir said of the AI program. For her current senior project, she has developed an AI model that identifies foods that meet more than a dozen dietary restrictions, including gluten-free diets and halal foods prepared according to Islamic dietary rules. “We are trying to create an AI that can tell whether food is halal or not,” she said.
This summer, Demir is doing a mobile computing internship at a business software company.
Break Through Tech’s approach appears to be working in at least one important measure. It’s a paid technical internship, an important career step that leads to a full-time job offer.
For example, only 36 percent of college graduates nationwide reported having a paid internship last year, according to data from the National Association of College and University Employers, an organization for recruiters and college career advisors. In contrast, of the approximately 150 students who completed the AI program in the past two years, Breakthrough found that 82% went on to receive paid internships with employers such as Accenture, Amazon, Fidelity, Google, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Microsoft. Tech announced.
In other words, the AI program isn’t trying to revolutionize the elitist tech industry’s hiring practices. We award prestigious credentials from elite institutions such as Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to students from other schools, helping them land technology jobs.
“These students don’t come from prestigious schools or from families that can open their doors,” said Judith Spitz, executive director of Break Through Tech. “We’re just giving our students an opportunity to show what they’re capable of.”
Computer science remains a male-dominated field. According to the Computing Research Association’s annual report on doctoral-granting universities, men accounted for nearly 78% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science in 2022, while Latina women and Black Americans Among women, only 2% had a bachelor’s degree. field program. Similarly, at some large tech companies, only a small percentage of computer programmers and software engineers are Latina or Black women.
In 2016, Dr. Spitz, a former Verizon executive, launched an initiative to address gender disparities at Cornell Tech. The program, now known as “Break Through Tech,” offers short-term paid technical internships to help computing students gain workplace experience and industry connections.
in 2022, Break Through Tech has launched an initiative specifically focused on expanding access to AI careers. It received $26 million in funding from donors led by Pivotal Ventures, the investment firm founded by Melinda French Gates.
That effort is rapidly expanding. In April, about 400 participants graduated from his AI program. For the next academic year, Break Through Tech has accepted nearly 1,000 students.
The program also teaches students about the potential for bias in AI, such as the flaws in facial recognition systems that led to the false arrest of a black man.
“When we think about both the potential and the dangers of AI;,Dr. Spitz said this in a lecture to students at the botanical garden. Who gains or loses? ”
Criticizing AI also comes with risks. Several prominent female researchers working for big tech companies who have raised questions about AI bias are no longer employed by those companies.
Some students said they also wanted to learn how to tackle more existential questions, such as when we shouldn’t use AI at all.
“We often underestimate how people’s voices can be manipulated and how dangerous AI can be,” said Ruth Okwo, a computer science major at Hunter College in Manhattan. He said that by participating in the event, he wanted to learn more about the possibilities. AI risks and harms. “I want to know what the law is or should be.”
Okuo, who works part-time at an Apple Store, said he is looking for new opportunities to further his interest in AI ethics.
As for Baruch College’s Prudencio, she did a paid summer internship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She will start working next month.
