AI for Service

Service-Learning does not stop despite the pandemic.  Earlier in the Fall Semester, Two courses, from Biomedical Engineering and Computing, jointly ran an integrated robotics-programming-artificial intelligence-computer vision project for a number of primary schools in Hong Kong.  

The kids are taught to train an AI equipped with a camera to recognise objects such as French Fries, hamburgers, …  

Then they design robots that can clean up the simulated guts of a human cluttered with stuff.  

They design and made their own handset to control the robot. 

This we successfully run in Fall 2021, with hundreds of PolyU students as tutors for hundreds of kids from several schools.  It is complicated enough just to explain.  Imagine running it, successfully, without too much headache. 

Now we are running the same project, remotely, in South Africa, Vietnam and Philippines. More or less simultaneously.  The South Africa project is jointly run with the University of Pretoria.  They recruit kids from the townships and put them into the laboratory on their campus, and assigned Pretoria students as tutors.  It is on-going right now.  The kids are learning everyday with our students, remotely.  The kids are taught to train an AI to recognise French Fries, …

The final competition is set for Sunday afternoon, Hong Kong Time, morning in Pretoria, South Africa. 

Of course, we have to ship a lot of stuff to South Africa and Vietnam.  The stuff was stuck at the customs in Vietnam for a month and a half.  Such are some of the challenges and risks in international service-learning.  

The Vietnam project is also on-going. Our team is amazing. We cannot be more proud of them.