Joyce: We are interviewing Cooper today because he won a few medals from the WAICY, the World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth competition and so he was representing Texas and we are super proud of him. So, we have a few questions for him and the first thing I will start with is: What is your name?

Cooper: Hi! My name is Cooper and I’m 12 years old.

Joyce: So, have you ever heard or learned something about Artificial Intelligence before?

Cooper: Yes, by Hello World. They taught me about AutoAuto and AutoAuto got me introduced into Artificial Intelligence. Since then, I’ve been making AI apps in AI chat blocks.

Joyce: That’s pretty great. So, how old were you when you started?

Cooper: I was like 9 about, yeah.

Joyce: All right, that’s pretty cool. And what inspired your idea for the competition?

Cooper: What inspired my idea the most is like I wanted to make a mini city and this autonomous car to go around a mini city, but first I had to start off on a smaller scale, with a car going around the track and just simply avoiding pedestrians.

Joyce: How did you use the AutoAuto car to change people’s lives?

Cooper: Well so, if this was like a real situation, it could provide mobility to the disabled, so they can go from point A to point B. If you’re, like, rushing to do something for work, the car can just drive you from point A to point B. And it could also decrease all the accidents, so it’d be a lot safer with autonomous cars only.

Watch Cooper’s Project Submission Below

Joyce: What do you think your biggest takeaway was?

Cooper: My biggest takeaway was that probably AI itself is a really good tool, but you need extra sensors to make it run smoothly.

Joyce: All right! So, do you want to participate in the competition again?

Cooper: Yes, I would love to participate in the WAICY competition because of all the people, fun and cool projects and making my own project.

Joyce: Right! And do you have something to say to people who might join the WAICY in 2020?

Cooper: It is definitely worth joining WAICY because you can just basically see all the projects, all the people and just show your own project and you might even win an award. It could change your career forever.

Joyce: Is there anything else you would like to say for people starting to code or starting to learn those things?

Cooper: So, you should keep on following that path because you could get your career to be totally changed and you can really get into it and it’s going to change the future because everything in the future requires coding.

Cooper: I used AutoAuto self-driving cars in this project, so thank you to them. The goal of the self-driving car is to basically have a car that transports a human from point A to point B. This would be helpful for people with disabilities. My goal is to program an autonomous mini toy car to avoid pedestrians and go around a track. For society, this could increase safety, decrease accidents and allow people who wouldn’t be able to drive by themselves to have an ability that they’ve never had before. I used OpenCV to recognize the pedestrians and predict which way to go on the track. So, basically it has a model that has … like … left and right, like what those tracks look like and it uses white tape to identify that. And so, basically, it’s like: Am I like 50% sure I would go right? And then, as it gets closer to the thing, it’s like: Oh, I’m 100% confident that I’m supposed to go right and it turns right. And for the pedestrians, it has multiple images of pedestrians, like tons of images of pedestrians on the road and it can recognize if it’s a pedestrian or not. See if the car goes around the track, slowly cruise its away around the track. You can see the angle that the car is predicting to go in, around the track. AI is a very great tool, but it has some challenges. For example, it saw the Statue of Liberty because it thought it was a pedestrian and I could fix this by training the model to do so. But is it just one flaw AI has. This part of the demo the camera cut off; this could be deadly in a real-life situation; engineers are gonna have to find a way around this. Thank you for watching my AI demonstration. I accomplished my goal of making an autonomous car move around the track, detect pedestrians and stop for them. Autonomous cars are going to make a big impact on transportation and safety. Thank you for watching this video and I’m really excited to compete in the contest.