The Mark Cuban Foundation (MCF) announced it will be bringing two Artificial Intelligence Bootcamps to Pittsburgh for high school students later this fall courtesy of hosting organizations Argo AI LLC and The Readiness Institute at Penn State. The Readiness Institute and Strip District-based autonomous vehicle startup Argo are two of more than 20 organizations across the country that are hosting 30 AI bootcamps from the foundation later this fall.
Both offerings — spread across four consecutive Saturdays beginning on October 22 — will come at no cost to the participating students. Prior experience with computer science, programming or robotics is not required in order for students to apply and, if selected, attend the bootcamps.
During the sessions, students will learn what AI is, where it's commonly found and the ethical implications of its use. Students will also get to build their own AI applications to see how it is used in chatbots, computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing.
Curriculum materials, the training of volunteer mentors and the recruitment and selection of local students to attend is provided or performed by MCF's AI Bootcamp initiative, which Pittsburgh-native Mark Cuban first started in 2019. To date, more than 450 students nationally have graduated from one of the bootcamps and MCF aspires to graduate 1,000 students alone in 2023.
The bootcamps' presence in Pittsburgh builds on a recent rise in local attention gravitating around AI over the past few weeks and months.
In June, 28 teachers from 24 western Pennsylvania school districts attended — at no cost to them — a week-long workshop program offered by Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science titled "Crash Course in Artificial Intelligence." It offered a common space for educators to learn more about AI so that these teachers can then go back to their respective schools and prepare courses or activities for their students, which itself is part of a larger effort that vies to prepare the region's workforce for a future where AI uses are likely to grow exponentially.
CMU's crash course on AI came about a week after military officials from the Austin, Texas-based U.S. Army Futures Command came to Pittsburgh to scout the region's various technology and innovation-related businesses for potential opportunities and investments. The trip followed the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) Pittsburgh chapter's hosting of the Artificial Intelligence + Autonomous Systems Symposium & Exposition event at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in April.
