Demystifying artificial intelligence | Around Campus - MIT News

Doctoral candidate Natalie Lao wants to show that anyone can learn to use AI to make a better world, says Kim Martineau, MIT Quest for Intelligence.

A PhD student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Natalie Lao has co-founded startups aimed at democratizing artificial intelligence and using AI to protect democracy by fighting false and misleading information.
Photo: Andrew Tsai

Natalie Lao was set on becoming an electrical engineer, like her parents, until she stumbled on course 6.S192 (Making Mobile Apps), taught by Professor Hal Abelson. Here was a blueprint for turning a smartphone into a tool for finding clean drinking water, or sorting pictures of faces, or doing just about anything. “I thought, I wish people knew building tech could be like this,” she said on a recent afternoon, taking a break from writing her dissertation.

After shifting her focus as an MIT undergraduate to computer science, Lao joined Abelson’s lab, which was busy spreading its App Inventor platform and do-it-yourself philosophy to high school students around the world. App Inventor set Lao on her path to making it easy for anyone, from farmers to factory workers, to understand AI, and use it to improve their lives. Now in the third and final year of her PhD at MIT, Lao is also the co-founder of an AI startup to fight fake news, and the co-producer of a series of machine learning tutorials. It’s all part of her mission to help people find the creator and free thinker within...

The HINTS team is now working with its first client, a media analytics firm based in Virginia. As CEO, Lao has called on her experience as a project manager from internships at GE, Google, and Apple, where, most recently, she led the rollout of the iPhone XR display screen. “I’ve never met anyone as good at managing people and tech,” says Tsai, an EECS master’s student who met Lao as a lab assistant for Abelson’s course 6.S198 (Deep Learning Practicum), and is now CTO of HINTS.
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Source: MIT News