Berkeley Professor teaches AI to Quest Students

Our Quest Academy students were excited last week, to learn from and speak with Dr. Allen Yang, Executive Director of the Vive Center for Enhanced Reality at the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Yang’s areas of research focus on AI, advanced pattern recognition, autonomous motion vehicles and AI curriculum development for elementary and secondary education.

As part of our comprehensive CS/AI curriculum at Quest Academy, Dr. Yang answered questions from our Lower School students; lectured to our Middle School students and; took questions from our Middle School students and faculty. Dr Yang spoke with Quest Academy students on the following topics:

• The Turing Test of Human vs Computer Interaction
• How autonomous motion vehicles are controlled, using mathematical models of Reinforcement Learning and the example of a mouse navigating a maze to find cheese
• How computers can self train to improve performance in video games
• The UC Berkeley Robot Open Autonomous Racing (ROAR) competition.

At the end of his talk with our Middle Schoolers, Dr Yang offered the opportunity for select Quest Academy students to apply for a summer internship, developing a LEGO based, autonomous vehicle with himself and a team of UC Berkeley grad students. Exciting!

Quest Academy will continue to bring in leading academic researchers throughout next year as part of its University Speakers Series, designed to expose Quest Academy students to the relevant issues on the forefront of academic research today.