AIx Teens Summit

Adding to the list of tech-centric happenings on campus in 2023, Pranavi Vedula ’25 and Hannah Park ’24 are teaming up to produce the third annual AIx Teens Summit, a one-day event focused on computer science and artificial intelligence geared to middle school and high school students. “We want to expose students to fields in AI they may not know about,” Park says. “Another goal is to inspire students, especially minorities and women, to pursue AI.”

Through presentations from college professors and professionals in the field, and smaller group discussions, the students hope to showcase the sometimes surprising ways AI can be used in nontech-related fields like environmental science, physics and the humanities Park and Vedula were intrigued by AI after attending prior AIx Teens events. “I attended the conference when I was in middle school,” Vedula says. “It really opened my eyes. AI is not just about robots. For example, you can use AI to analyze languages. There’s so much more to it.”

In an era of Hotmail accounts and accessing the web via CD downloads of America Online (AOL) software, the campus was changing. “Everyone was excited about the potential of the internet,” Weaver says. “A lot of students became quite tech-savvy and came from families who may not have had computers or internet access. It was a big step forward.”

After receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees from MIT in mathematics and computer science and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, Weaver started her career at IBM, doing predictive modeling and machine learning. She joined Google in 2012 as the company’s first product lead for machine learning. Now Weaver is involved in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at Google and draws on her Exeter experiences to maintain connections. She returns to campus often as a mentor and speaker, and founded an Exeter alumni employee group at Google. “At Exeter, I was surrounded by bright kids who were nothing like me, but we all loved to learn,” she says. “That common sense of belonging was magic.”

20th-Century Learning

The dot-com boom of the late 1990s popularized personal computing and computer science as an academic discipline. When the Phelps Science Center opened in 2001, computer science classes were relocated from the Academy Building to a designated space in Phelps. The move was both practical and symbolic. Three years later, the Curriculum Review Committee approved a course on algorithmic thinking as a diploma requirement for all four-year