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Alice envisions the future, DigiGirlz AI Class

Welcome to Alice envisions the future, DigiGirlz AI Class – a place where high-school and university girls around the world can develop their understanding of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s leading technology in terms of its potential for building a better future. Gain on-demand access to a collection of tutorials, games and technological resources designed to equip you with the knowledge and the skills you need to apply this technology in real life.

We challenge girls everywhere to come up with creative solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems and learn how to implement them. Enter the world of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), and join other visionaries like yourself in a continuous effort to use AI for good. If you have grand ideas about the future and would like to implement them one day, this is a great place to start. No prior coding experience is required. Only endless curiosity and determination.

Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has been an integral part of our world for many years. Whether it’s scrolling through a personalized news feed on our favorite social network, or asking a virtual assistant about the weather, we are constantly engaging with AIs. But we don’t just rely on AI to make our lives more comfortable. This technology has been used to make cars safer, diagnose sick people, make growing food more sustainable, and much more. And we continue to come up with new ways to implement it. One of the most exciting things about AI is that we simply don’t know how much better the world could be if we used it to serve the best possible good. This class explores AI and its many applications, with an emphasis on real-life examples that have already impacted our lives. Throughout the course you will learn what “intelligence” means from the perspective of an AI, how to identify the different AIs in our day-to-day lives, what the different methods of data collections are and why they are important for Machine Learning. 

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Build your Chatbot

A chatbot is an AI that can simulate a human conversation, and is often used by businesses to make themselves available to their customers 24/7. But some chatbots can do so much more. Virtual assistants like Cortana respond to voice-commands, which allows the user to multitask while having instant access to the internet, their contacts, their calendar and their emails. A chatbot can offer minimal assistance by answering a finite number of questions, or it can be a venerable sidekick. It all depends on your ingenuity and skill level.

Ready for a challenge? Build your very own chatbot that can interact naturally with users and offer a slew of useful services, using Azure Bot Service.

Take a look at how you can build a chatbot for remote learning and remote working, using Azure.

Start your own chatbot here

Minecraft Hour of Code Lesson

Explore basic coding concepts and learn about artificial intelligence by helping prevent forest fires with Minecraft and MakeCode. In this game, you will be required to use code in order to prevent further devastation and help regrow forests areas that are already damaged. Work just like Microsoft’s AI for Earth team, who use artificial intelligence to help solve global environmental challenges.

Start here, follow the steps

Machine Learning

Machine Learning is what enables a machine to learn from gathered data without being specifically programed for it. It is the foundation of AI, even though people often confuse the two.
In this class you will gain a comprehensive understanding of Machine Learning and how it relates to AI. Learn how to approach problem-solving from a Machine Learning perspective, how to work with datasets, the importance of data and how to protect it, how to think in terms of design, understand cluster algorithms, create BOTs and more.

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Machine Learning Classification

Machine learning classification is the method by which an AI can learn how to predict categories by assigning labels to new data. For example, an AI can predict whether a soccer match will be a “win” or a “loss”. In this module, you will learn how to use logistic regression to determine the probability that something is true or that an event will happen. You will also learn how to use support vector machines (SVMs) to incorporate multiple labels into a model. This technology has been used in biology to accurately classify proteins and DNA sequences. Find out why you need to split big datasets into data used to train the model and data used to test the model.

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Classify Images with Custom Vision

Microsoft Custom Vision Service is one component of the Microsoft Cognitive Services suite. Its purpose is to create image classification models that “learn” from labeled images you provide. This will enable an AI to identify the content of a picture, based on previous examples. The bigger the database of pre-labeled images, the more accurate the AI will be in identifying new pictures. Image classification is in increasingly high demand, as it can serve to automate tasks such as combing the internet for images containing offensive content or inspecting products on the assembly line for defects. Building an image-classification model from scratch can be costly and requires expertise. This module will teach you how to use the Custom Vision Service to easily create a sophisticated image-classification model.

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The Confused App: Face & Emotion Detection

How many expressions can you make with your face? Check out the step-by-step tutorial on how you can embed a facial-recognition feature into an app. The AI will analyze pictures of faces and try to identify the emotion it sees, plus any distinctive features such as gender, age, race and hair color. The app will also display a percentage indicating how accurate the AI believes its assessments to be. This type of AI could be used to evaluate the engagement level of a crowd at a public speaking event. Or to identify the different demographics in a company’s user database.

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Recyclinator: Custom Vision and Power Apps  

This is a step-by-step tutorial on how to build an app that can correctly identify and sort your everyday trash for recycling purposes. You will teach the AI how to perceive the different objects you want it to sort, and help improve its success rate through repeated image processing. Become a better programmer by understanding how an AI perceives the world and how it decodes that information.

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Deep learning & Neural Networks

Ever wondered how smart phones became “smart” in the first place? Or how we ever managed to make self-driving cars? To understand how we achieved these technological feats, you must first grasp the concept of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and deep learning. Modeled after the neural networks in our brain, these groundbreaking technologies allow AI to perceive and interpret the world more like a human would, and to make better decisions as a result. In this course, you will learn the difference between deep learning and machine learning, how ANNs resemble and differ from the human brain, and how natural language processing allows AIs to conduct a sentiment analysis.

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Data Science Literacy

Data science combines scientific methods, software programming and data analysis in order to gain useful insights and transform complex information into clear, actionable points-of-view. In this module, you will gain access to three tiers based on your skill level: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Take the IQ skill test to find out where to start. The course goes in-depth into some of the best practices for data gathering, data interpretation and communication.

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Make Predictions from Complex Data with Neural Networks

Even though neural networks have been hypothesized since the 1940s, the amount of processing power necessary to sustain them made the technology impractical until recently. Today, they are one of the main tools used in modern machine learning. Advancements made with storage processing power and open-source tools have allowed many successful applications of neural networks in medical diagnosis, filtering explicit content, speech recognition, and machine translation. In this module, you will learn about neural networks structures, layers, edges and weights, how to visualize predictions and refine neural network models and you will learn how to apply different types of activation functions and optimizers.

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AI for Good

This course offers an overview of Microsoft’s AI for Good program, which aims to infuse conservation efforts around the globe with user-friendly AI technology, in order to make those efforts considerably more efficient and cost-effective. Throughout the course you will learn how AI can improve the lives of the less privileged, the extent to which human actions have negatively impacted our planet, and how Microsoft hopes to reverse those consequences by working together with small, medium and large organizations around the world. Let these projects inspire you to come up with your own ideas on how to help preserve our planet, and make it a better home for everyone. What are some conservation efforts that can be improved with AI? How can we make humanitarian actions more efficient? Remember, AI is only a tool. It takes creative thinking to figure out how best to use it.

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Conversational AI for Smart Cities

The most exciting aspect of AI technology is understanding how it can be used to affect significant changes in the way we live our lives. Smart Cities is a demo that aims to showcase how AI can help residents become active participants in their communities and help government employees be more efficient by staying well informed. In these modules, you will learn how to implement advanced features for similar scenarios. Configure a web bot that can help citizens implement simple tasks like preparing to remodel their kitchen. Build a multi-channel bot that will enable residents to create a damage report. And find out how you can use Cognitive Search to help city employees to review city performance.

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Pre-requisites

In order to complete some of the courses, you will first need to access the cloud services available on Azure – Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. Any student is eligible to receive a free 12-month subscription using their student e-mail address. This will grant you access to an array of useful tools and AI services. For more details, check out Azure’s FAQ section.

You will also rely on Office 365 apps to fulfill certain tasks. Microsoft Teams, PowerApps, OneDrive, Sway and a lot of other cool cloud products and services are available for free, if your school is registered here. Ask your teachers to register your school. Find out more about our Office 365 A1 package here.