Xiaohongshu
From first joining UCL in 2018 to experiencing the upending of university life by the COVID-19 pandemic last spring, it feels as though my academic life has been characterised by its constant evolution; only one through-line - the Artificial Intelligence Society - has maintained an unwavering grasp on me, wholly because of how important my work there has felt. Exposing the depth of influence algorithms have over the modern world and the ways they fundamentally operate allows students to actively engage with this undercurrent of the digital era rather than watch their careers be bowled over by it, and no time has this been more urgent than in the face of the mass digital conversion of everyday life spurred on by COVID-19. Thus, when I was elected AI Society President last spring, we committed to taking full advantage of the flexibility of a purely digital presence, to disseminate AI resources on a scale not previously possible.
Through overhauling of the society structure, curriculum, and information channels, and migrating all our affairs to a newly developed web hub - uclaisociety.com - we accommodated the stratified working hours of the new world through making all content non-timezone-specific. Not only did the tutorial team build from scratch a curriculum of interactive notebooks, but for the first time in our history taught hands-on machine learning tutorials on hand gesture recognition, neural ODEs and AI in robotics. Furthermore, through forming partnerships with BenevolentAI, the Ada Lovelace Institute, and the UCL Centre for AI, our recorded events fostered engagement from members of diverse backgrounds: it felt truly like a remnant of the old times to stay on call for 45 minutes after our scheduled end as the last stragglers got their one-on-one questions in with the presenter. Ultimately, the reach of our tutorials and talks - surpassing any previous year - came down to the coordinated efforts of intensely committed students, now immortalised on the website for all.
While engaging our audience was paramount, it was the ingenuity of our senior leaders to open novel communication channels like a society discord and weekly news blog, paired with the institution of biweekly committee ML programming challenges and hackathons by our treasurer Jamie, that roused the comradery that naturally evolves among students volunteering their free time in service of educating others.
In a year where each of us have experienced profound loss - of loved ones, of basic daily structure, and of invaluable time in our young lives - it could have been tempting to roll back operations and re-emerge when the world returned. It was the consistent enthusiasm of each member on our incredible committee that propelled us to not only survive, but thrive in the online niche we carved. I am so touched to have played a part in it, and to have helped spread our resources wider than previously possible. I have no doubts that the AI Society - now set in motion - will prove to be an unstoppable force at UCL.
Written by Rachel Sava, third year BSc Neuroscience