Since he had contracted COVID, Dr. Laber connected with us over Zoom today. We started the day off by learning how to plot a linear regression model in R. A linear regression model’s goal is to find the line of best fit on a scatter plot, and it does this by minimizing the loss (the distance between the points and the line of best fit on the y-axis). We also talked about K Nearest Neighbors, which is an algorithm that makes predictions about where a specific point may be. He also gave us the opportunity to write our own K Nearest Neighbors program where we write the same program he gave us but with multiple neighbors. This was my attempt to do so.
In the afternoon, we talked to Jesse Clifton, who’s a PhD student at NC State, about the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Since machine learning is utilized by giving it a task, it’ll accomplish that task to the best of its ability by whatever means necessary. This means that if you give it a goal that isn’t perfect, it’ll find loopholes in order to maximize its rewards. The reason why it’s so important to have diversity in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning is so that the goals of these algorithms aren’t determined by a group made up by people with the same viewpoint or perspective.