The AI School of India (AISI) has launched an online contest for school students. The AI COVID warrior contest is open to students from Classes 3 to 12 across the globe.
Students must come up with innovative solutions to tackle COVID-19. Prizes include internship at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, among others.
B.V. Ramana Prasad, who runs the online school, said the idea was to take AI to the global market. “We wanted to offer this innovative contest to all as it is for social good. We expect at least 10,000 students to participate.”
Younger students may win prizes and older students, especially those in the 9-12 grade, will have an opportunity to do a month’s internship at the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. The Centre is one of the partners in the contest, besides CS Patashala, KidzByte and KavinCare.
Mr. Ramana said students could use a coding language to analyse the genetic code, feed it to the computer and make it learn. They could see what genetic code had been disturbed due to COVID-19. Younger children could use face detection technology to identify if a person is wearing a mask.
An innovation called coughvid uses a person’s cough into the laptop for 10 seconds to identify the infection. Elsewhere just by breathing into a machine a person’s COVID-19 infection can be detected, he said.
“Children good in biology, statistics and maths will come up with ideas. We want to rope in as many people as possible. We will upload the videos on YouTube for the world to share,” he said, adding that the contest is to expose children to the opportunity to innovate.
Mr. Ramana is an alumnus of IIT-Madras and is on the board of Centre for Innovation at the Institute.
Registration for the contest, which is on from June 1 to July 31, is free. For more details visit https://aischoolofindia.com/ai-covid-warriors/.
AI School of India is an online learning platform providing transformational AI and coding technology education to students in the country.
