AI4ALL is excited to announce the new Chapter Leads that will be heading up meetup events, both online and in-person for alumni.
East Coast Chapter Leads:
Mid Atlantic & Southern States:
Raza Abbas
Hello! My name is Raza Abbas, from the Princeton ’18 Program, and I currently live in South Jersey. Sakhi and I are really excited to work with all of you! Some of the things we hope to accomplish this academic year are a few meetups in places you guys could decide on and on a date that works for you. I hope I get to meet all of you through our online meetings and actual meetups and I to ensure that all of us alumni can stay connected with the AI4ALL Family and all the wonderful things they offer. I’m looking forward to working with you guys to plan fun events for everyone.
Sakhi Shah
Hi! I’m currently a junior in high school and I attended the Princeton camp just this past summer. A little bit about me is that I love to play tennis and read! As a chapter lead I am very excited to reconnect with the people I met at the Princeton camp I attended along with meeting new alumni from all over the east coast. Together, Raza and I hope to connect all the alumni living in the east coast and host meetups such as hackathons. I am very excited to be the chapter lead for the east coast!
New England:
Kate Taylor
Hello! My name is Kate Taylor and I am delighted to say that I am one of this year’s New England Region Chapter Leads, alongside Katie Stevo and Tracy Qiu. I am a junior at Newton South High School and am entering my third year on the varsity swim team. I am also a swimming instructor at a local swim school. This past summer I attended the Boston University AI4ALL program and the experience truly changed my life. For this coming year as a team, we hope to embody and add to the values we saw in our own program and continue to not only help each other grow as individuals but to strengthen our community as a whole. As young people in STEM, we have a responsibility to our peers to support one another and I hope to facilitate a safe space of discussion and dialogue where we can all come together and feel truly supported and inspired. The opportunity to be a role model and a leader for my fellow peers in STEM, especially as a woman, is not only something I am grateful for but something I look forward to.
Katie Stevo
My name is Katie Stevo and I am so excited to be one of the New England Region Chapter Leads for the upcoming year. I am currently a junior at the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and I attended the Boston University AI4ALL program during the summer of 2018. In my spare time I love to play basketball, solder, and build robots. I am also a huge Celtics fan and I love all things Disney. As a team, we hope that we can create an inclusive community for all alumni, so that we can support each other, especially as women in STEM. The community that we built over the summer was amazing. I hope that as chapter leads we will be able to strengthen it with even more alumni. I am looking forward to meeting all the alumni who didn’t go to my program and welcoming them to the New England AI4ALL community.
Tracy Qiu
Hi! My name is Tracy Qiu, and I attended Boston University’s 2018 AI4ALL. I am so thankful for this opportunity to be a chapter lead of this year’s New England Region with Kate Taylor and Katie Stevo. After spending a life-changing summer with an empowering group of young women at AI4ALL, I plan to continue pursuing my passion for STEM alongside this supportive community. As a leader, I hope to reconnect our alumni community and engage one another in STEM and AI while supporting each other in our personal journey’s, for this summer we found how inspiring a supportive and inclusive community can be. I am so grateful to be able to lead these amazing young women, and I look forward to breaking down barriers in this male-dominated field. Passionate about giving back to my community, I have organized events at my high school donating over $5,000 to the Boston Children’s Hospital, and I hope with AI we can innovate to benefit our communities and those in need.
West Coast Chapter Leads:
Pacific Northwest:
Archika Dogra
Archika is a Junior at Interlake High School from Bellevue, Washington and a proud 2017 Stanford AI4ALL alum. AI4ALL was a turning point for her in computer science as an experience that encouraged her to pursue research, work experience, and community outreach with her new skills. When she isn’t coding or running EduSTEM workshops, she enjoys hiking, traveling, debating, and exploring the Pacific Northwest. Archika is excited to expand the reach of AI4ALL and promote diversity in AI around the PNW!
Eshika Saxena
Eshika is a senior at Interlake High School in Bellevue, Washington. She attended Stanford AI4ALL in 2016. As an AI4ALL grant recipient, Eshika has organized many workshops to introduce kids in her community to programming and AI. In her high school, Eshika is the founder and president of the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Club, president of Science National Honor Society, and vice president of Math National Honor Society. Eshika is passionate about applying AI to solve real-world problems and has conducted AI research at the University of Washington and MIT. To share her passion for technology, Eshika has co-founded a 501(c)3, not-for-profit organization, TakeKnowledGe, to encourage children, girls in particular, to experience STEM through fun and engaging activities. Eshika is excited to serve as an AI4ALL chapter lead and is looking forward to helping build a supportive community of students interested in AI!
Southern California & Southwest:
Aissatou Camara
I am Aissatou Camara, I am from Guinea, West Africa. Two years ago, I did not know what badminton was and now I one of the lead players on the team. I attended AI4ALL at Princeton, New Jersey in the summer of 2018. One of the goals that I hope to accomplish individually as well as collectively, is to expand the AI4ALL alumni community and share with others my knowledge of AI. Additionally, as a chapter lead I hope to accomplish reinforcing the skills we gained during the AI4ALL summer program through activities to elevate the group to the next level and ensure that our AI4ALL alumni community is a place for everyone. I am looking forward to meeting AI4ALL alumni and hearing their experiences with AI and technology related topics.
Natalie Rodriguez
A fact about me is I am Native Mexican and I would like to major in nursing. I attended Princeton AI4ALL 2018 in New Jersey. As a chapter lead, I hope to share my knowledge of AI and reach out to the future generations. As a team, we would like to create many functions for people to attend or view the live stream, while being able to obtain new information about AI. I am looking forward to meeting new people and hearing their opinions on AI, and how it’ll affect the future.
Northern California & Nevada:
Anooshree Sengupta
Anooshree attended Stanford AI4All ’15 and is currently a freshman at Stanford University. As one of the West Coast Chapter Leads, she hopes to create an inclusive, fun, and strong community for alumni from throughout the region, and to help alumni achieve their educational and technical goals. She is excited to meet other alumni and further the mission of AI4All. She is passionate about design, ethics, and technology, especially their intersection in artificial intelligence and innovations like self-driving cars. On campus, she is involved in the student-run nonprofit SHE++, which encourages diversity in STEM worldwide. She plans to major in Computer Science and possibly minor in French. This quarter, she is training to be CS section leader on campus so she can continue teaching a subject she is passionate about. In her free time, Anooshree enjoys going on outdoor adventures, doing calligraphy, and baking (she and a friend are trying to start an organization to distribute cakes to local homeless shelters!).
Eva Prakash
Eva Prakash is a Stanford AI4ALL 2016 alum and is thrilled to be an AI4ALL Chapter Lead. AI is so fascinating to her — it doesn’t just power voice assistants or recommend Netflix shows, it is the most transformative technology of our time and is revolutionizing every major industry! Since AI is making key decisions about our lives, Eva wants to help ensure it is developed by a diverse community of female technologists, so that its assessments are truly all-inclusive and not simply male-dominated. She hopes as a Chapter Lead, she can build a tight-knit, supportive, ambitious community of AI4ALL girls ready to be the future of AI! Fun fact: Eva is the author of the young adult fiction book Alan Purring, which tells the story of a young Latina who crafts an AI-powered catbot named Alan Purring. She also delivered a TEDx talk titled “Why Diversity Matters for the Future of AI.”
Midwest Chapter Leads:
Ekanem Okeke
Ekanem is a Stanford 2018 AI4ALL alum and a current sophomore in high school. Her curiosity spans many topics from anime and Marvel comics to NBA drama. She’s hopeful that connecting with AI4ALL alumni will give her the chance to extend on that wide range of knowledge. Working with her epic co-chapter lead Maria, she is excited to maximize the opportunities of the Midwest and get to know the alumni. Overall, Ekanem is looking forward to this opportunity to meet some new people, share some knowledge and make bad jokes.
Maria Cheriyan
Maria is a Stanford ’18 AI4ALL alum who loves astronomy and orange passionfruit guava juice. She can often be found whistling Broadway tunes or trying to capture her thoughts on life in a short story. With Ekanem, her wonderful co-chapter lead, she wants to support her AI4ALL family in the Midwest. Research reviews! Discussions about ethics in AI! Overflowing computer science puns! Don’t fear — there’ll never be a dull moment. As a chapter lead, Maria’s looking forward to knowing all of her chapter members, sharing a laugh at the plethora of inside jokes that will inevitably crop up, and changing the world with AI4ALL.
International Chapter Leads:
Cathy Zhou
Cathy Zhou is an alumnus of the 2018 Stanford program who comes from Beijing, China. She loves to play badminton and squash, enjoys solving math puzzles, and never misses breakfast even if it’s a Sunday morning. As a chapter lead, she hopes to provide a platform that alumni could connect with each other, share about their cool experiences after the camp, and talk about their opinions on AI-related and equality-related issues. She also hopes that more people, especially girls and international students, could be introduced to the fascinating field of AI through programs like AI4ALL. She is most looking forward to getting to know more alumni and hearing about their thoughts and experiences!
Manal Alkeaid
Stanford AI4ALL 2018 was an eye-opening experience that kindled an interest in artificial intelligence that has extended beyond the duration of the program. As an alumni chapter lead, I am excited to spread the knowledge of AI in my local community and to make it more accessible to ambitious young people with a keen interest in this fast-growing branch of computer science. After all, predictions are pretty optimistic when it comes to AI and the global economy in particular, where AI is expected to contribute a whopping $15.7 trillion by 2030. With the help of my teammate, we can effectively take advantage of our vast traditional and educational diversity. Though we have grown up in starkly contrasting environments, our shared passion for AI brought us together and will aid us in reinforcing the connection between alumni and our respective communities. If I had to pick what I am looking forward to the most in my role as chapter lead, it would definitely be the online meetups and intriguing, engaging webinars that I plan to hold, where we can develop sound stances on discussion topics like women in STEM and the morality of AI.