Hunter hosted the first day of a two-day workshop for the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2020 Conference in February 2020, addressing a big question: “How can you use AI to help society?” This event, part of a top-tier international annual conference that offers programming to academics from undergraduates to mid-career faculty members, provided a diverse group of technology-oriented college students the opportunity to experiment with robotic technology through hands-on practice and problem solving. 

On the second day of the workshop, more than 400 people stopped by the Natural History Museum to see a presentation of the work the students had built at Hunter, all projects including an AI-powered robot named Cosmo. You can see some of the work of this exciting project yourself in this video by ReadyAI (featuring Hunter  CS students Denysse Cunza’20 and Aryan Bhatt’21 as speakers, as well as Anna Lis’21, Shereen Hassan, Mary Fan’20, Owen Kunhardt’22, Elizabeth Wieczorek’21 and Ferdi Lesporis’21):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GQGNRSyHA8

The Hunter students were part of a group of 40 talented students from all over the country were recruited to take part, including 9 students from the Hunter computer science program—a program which has burgeoned, going from 80 to nearly 1000 computer science majors in the last decade. The program was co-led by Hunter Professor Anita Raja, who sees exciting possibilities for computer science students who are curious about AI to engage more fully in the field: “We want students to be thinking about what AI is doing for society and to plant the seeds for how we can solve problems – be it in agriculture or finance or the environment. And I’ve never been in a school where there are this many undergraduates involved in computer science who are so engaged.”