Sep 21, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read

Mention artificial intelligence, and thoughts might turn to films featuring a big guy with trendy sunglasses and an Austrian accent.

Infinitely less intimidating than “The Terminator” is Anki’s Cozmo, a pint-sized AI robot that’s part forklift, part steamroller and good for some giggles.

“In our project, we did something like encode him to say, ‘I am going to deliver this to someone,'” Baker Elementary School student Cynthia Shen said in her best imitation of a robot-type voice. “And he just goes over and gives it to them, which is very funny.”

Cynthia is part of a five-person team of Upper St. Clair School District elementary students who participated in the first World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth, held in the summer at Carnegie Mellon University.

Their project – programming Cozmo for a use that answers the question “How can AI change the world?” – tackled an issue with which the United States has struggled for decades: energy.

Using Legos to represent components such as windmills on one side of a table and houses on the other, the Upper St. Clair students programmed Cozmo to deliver “energy cubes” from the power sources to users. And for their efforts, they earned the competition’s Multimedia Excellence Award for Outstanding Visual Design.

“We were presenting first, and I was kind of scared that we were going to mess up,” team member Luke An, who attends Streams Elementary School, recalled. “I don’t think we did.”

More than 200 youngsters took part in the competition, which was presented by ReadyAI, a Pittsburgh-based company that focuses on artificial intelligence education for preschool, elementary and secondary students globally.

“If you read any newspaper or anything, AI is everywhere,” Andrew Chen explained. “They call that the fourth industrial revolution. So what does that mean to the younger generation or even to the adults who want to get into it?”

Chen is co-founder and chief learning officer for ReadyAI’s parent company, WholeRen Group, which has the goal of supporting international students in the U.S. educational system.

And that includes preparing students across the board for opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence, a concept that may put some people off because of, say, its depiction in science-fiction novels and movies. Helping children become familiar at a young age should help mitigate any trepidation, according to ReadyAI project manager Jason Huang.

“If you look at a four-year-old who’s using facial recognition, who’s using speech recognition,” he said about some of the aspects of artificial intelligence, “how is that scary? It’s not scary anymore. It’s just in your house. You can see it right there.”

As part of the World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth, ReadyAI provided participants with its AI-In-a-Box package of a Cozmo robot, Kindle Fire tablet and game controller.

“The student can start to learn AI within 10 minutes,” Chen said, and then they’re on the way toward fulfilling another of his organization’s goals: “We don’t really want AI to just go to certain people. We really want to open it up. If you think of it as the next industrial revolution, it will involve everybody, not just the programmers or engineers.”

It also will involve creativity, he said, noting that the competition stresses the “art” component of STEAM (also including science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.

As an example, a team of students from South Fayette Township – Maryan Kashif, Malak Saeed and Raneem Shedeed – developed a project for Cozmo to “ask a sad person if he or she would like to bake a cookie.” If so, that’s what the robot proceeds to do.

The award-winning Upper St. Clair team, named SCALA for the first names of all five members, also includes Streams students Ava Liu, Aaron Jiang and Samuel An, Luke’s brother. Ava gave a prediction for AI:

“I think that maybe in the future, somebody can make something that can bring you stuff from a restaurant, and then you don’t even have to go outside,” she said. “It flies and brings it over to you from a restaurant, like a cheeseburger.”

Whether it will have an Austrian accent is up for grabs.

For more information, visit www.readyai.org.