Avantika Ghosh is a high school student in the Bay Area. Participating in AI4ALL’s SAILORS program inspired Avantika to start the first ever Artificial Intelligence (AI) Club at her high school with the mission of providing exposure to high school students on the different branches of AI as well as its ethical and societal impact through speaker sessions, debates, movie screenings, and coding workshops in Python and Java. Avantika additionally works as a Junior Director at Byte-Sized with other SAILORS alums, to help with workshops around the Bay Area, to spread STEM education to middle school girls. She also participated in online AI game challenges like Halite, where with the assistance of other club members, she created an AI system to enable a bot to mass produce and overpower the opponents by getting access to their game map within the Halite AI framework. Her team ranked 110th in the nation within a group of 1558 coders. She was also awarded the regional NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Award 2017 by the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, California (https://www.aspirations.org/users/avantika-103360).
SAILORS educated her not only in the field of AI and its applications, but also made her aware of the opportunities available to girls interested in pursuing STEM, and forged in her a determination to succeed in a STEM career. It gave her the knowledge and resources to generate awareness among her peers, most of whom have had no exposure to the field of AI or have misconceptions about it. Attending SAILORS changed how she perceives the world around her, helped her understand how it can all change in the future, and enabled her to think constructively about how this change can be a positive force in society.
