Update: Forbes Article

Elena Sinel, founder of Acorn Aspirations, recently forwarded an article to me. It was written by Tabitha Goldstaub- co-founder of CognitionX (which focuses on AI- I spoke at the CognitionX conference in London earlier this year) and British Tech Entrepreneur- and published in Forbes. The article is mostly about how schools need reform in order to keep up with technology and how (and why) Acorn Aspirations was founded , but there is a small part about my team from the 2 week accelerator back in August. The article asks us about SKai (our idea) and about us as a team- are we undermined because of our age? Why did we choose to work on skin conditions? What are we most excited about in the future? It’s a nice article and features a pretty cringy photo of me and the team which is always a plus.

The article can be found here.

NASA Space Apps Challenge

Over the past weekend (20th to the 21st of October) I participated in the NASA Space Apps Challenge, an international 48 hours hackathon in which participants can used open-data to solve problems given by NASA. It is an adult-only event, however Acorn Aspirations petitioned and allowed thirty or so teens to compete- the only teen participants in the world. All across the world people worked either on their own or on teams to create a projects which they would  then upload to the Space Apps Website to be judged. The teen hack took place at the Microsoft Reactor, London.

Girls In AI hackathon in San Francisco

Previously on LicenceToCode:

Quick recap, I won the 2 weeks accelerator course run by Acorn Aspirations back in the end of August and because of that, my team and I got to San Francisco from the 11th to the 16th of October. Our trip was sponsored by Mastercard and a company specializing in artificial intelligence they bought called Brighterion. 

The next day, we were given a tour around the Brighterion offices and the area where the hack (run over Saturday and Sunday) would be held. After, we got lunch (paid for by Mastercard) with Akli Adjaoute, the CEO of Brighterion.

After our tour, we wanted to get some sightseeing in before the hack over the weekend, so we walked to Pier 39 (a popular tourist attraction for its shops and sea lions), then went to see the Golden Gate Bridge at night.

The GirlsInAI hack was a girls only event and sold out, with over 50 girls from a range of ages attending. Girls were split into teams of around 4 and were challenged to come up with a solution (to pitch on Sunday) to one of the problems proposed to them. On the first day, as well as mentoring, I also ran a python workshop for beginners, which taught me how to approach teaching large groups.