Introduction to Ryan Tietjen, AI Ambassador
Tell us a little about yourself. What are your hobbies? Why are you studying artificial intelligence? Anything else we should know?
I’m Ryan Tietjen, a Junior at the Computer Science Academy at Freehold High School in Freehold, NJ. In school, I am actively gaining computer programming skills while developing data structures, classes, and user-friendly GUI programs in Java. After school, I continue to expose myself to as many areas related to Computer Science as I can by participating in various school clubs. For example, I am a member of both the Computer Science League and the Technology Student Association. The Computer Science League introduces me to advanced areas of Computer Science and enhances my programming skills with difficult challenges. The Technology Student Association also provides me with personal development and leadership, while introducing me to career opportunities in STEM fields.
I plan to major in Computer Science in college and AI may be a special focus that I’d like to pursue in college. AI is a field that keeps growing and evolving into something that is helping people’s lives become easier and more efficient. AI will improve the way we all live and work in our society and studying AI will help me to be at the forefront of innovation and change for social good.
My other hobbies are playing video games and playing baseball. I recently launched a service project where I collect pre-owned baseball equipment and donate it to local youth players in need of equipment. Here’s my website: https://www.playballexchange.com/
What was your AI Scholars Experience like? Who was your instructor and what is it like working with them? What project did you work on?
In my AI Scholars program, it was exciting to learn how to develop machine learning models. I enjoyed working with my team on the group project, which put the skills we learned to good use. We developed a machine learning model that would predict if a news site was fake or real based on several features such as the website’s domain, the number of sources it cited, and the frequency of certain buzz words.
My instructor was Angela Gu. It was great working with her because she taught us how to code the models. After the program ended, she was able to share useful advice on how to continue building on my AI path.
What topic will you write about in your blog? Describe your topic in detail!
The first topic I’ll write about is an AI project I worked on that studied how Covid-19 impacts a student’s ability to effectively learn in an online remote setting. Given features such as the number of hours spent in online meetings, the number of hours spent doing homework, and the number of hours spent in extra help sessions, a machine learning model will predict how well that student will effectively learn. This also means that this model can give advice on what a student should change about their learning environment in order to allow them to learn more effectively.
The next topic I’ll write about is the fake news detection project I did with Inspirit AI. Because there are a lot of political issues that many people debate about now, there is an abundance of fake news in which my model could be helpful in detecting.
I also have an interest in developing a cybersecurity AI project that I hope to blog about in the future.
Who is your target audience? Why should they be interested in your blog?
My target audience is high school students, and especially those who have an interest in Computer Science. The remote learning topic directly relates to them because it is topical now with so many schools in full remote or hybrid remote learning structures. My future blog posts will provide insight that high school students can benefit from.
What are you hoping to achieve with your blog?
I want to provide high school students with a new way of thinking about topical matters such as remote learning during Covid-19, fake news, and cybersecurity. My blog will give me a voice for social good and will allow me to interact with like-minded people who can leave comments and share their thoughts as well.
Ryan Tietjen is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.
