FOURTH HONORS EXPERIENCE
From AI Hobbyist to AI Educator: Symposium Presentation
Self Designed
Spring Semester 2025

I caught wind of the neural networking breakthroughs a bit earlier than most, around the latter half of Spring 2022, thanks to a few YouTube channels that highlight interesting academic papers as they are published (shoutout to Two Minute Papers & AI Explained ). I have always been a fan of AI, so when I learned that we were getting a lot closer to HAL in real life, my curiosity was peaked and I started playing around with the technology as it released. I got involved with a niche community of developers all trying to get the computer sizes needed to run these models from the size of data center supercomputers down to a normal person's laptop.

Then ChatGPT happened.

Suddenly, the rest of the world started paying attention to the stuff I had been tinkering with. Every news station was blasting the same headlines and every person was asking the same questions. Even companies and organizations were getting swept up in the hype, and UC was no exception to this. As a reaction to the turbulence caused by AI's sudden appearance in the education scene, UC's Digital Technology Solutions board announced that they would be launching a new symposium to be held annually. It would be called the AI & Emerging Technologies Symposium, hosted on campus, attendable by the entire UC community, and open to applications for breakout speakers!

While I like to think I'm a fairly bright guy, I'm no rocket scientist and I'm definitely no neural network designer. I thought that, at most, I would go and listen to a few talks. But an idea kept nagging at me, no matter how many times I dismissed myself or how crazy it felt to say. I applied to speak.

No formal training. No degree. No job in the field. My resume would've consisted of YouTube videos & trial and error. 5% of my time "using AI" had probably just been troubleshooting errors alone. I did it anyway. I titled my breakout AI Decoded: Hands-On for Everyone, and its focus was to cover the fundamentals of neural networks, the Transformer architecture, multi-headed self-attention, and current developments in the field. The last major goal; to teach all this though easily-digestible diagrams, examples, non-technical language, and even live-demos.

I think the presentation was a success. I'll let you decide for yourselves.