
High School Club Builds Self-Driving Vehicle - sohkamyung
http://theinstitute.ieee.org/ieee-roundup/blogs/blog/high-school-club-builds-selfdriving-vehicle
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sien
This paragraph is interesting:

For the most part, I’m self-taught. I took a series of C programming language
classes a few years ago from Stanford’s GiftedandTalented.com program. I
learned the Python programming language on my own. In eighth grade, I took
advanced-placement calculus and statistics courses, which enabled me to take
multivariate calculus in ninth grade. We are fortunate at my school because we
have a professor from Foothill College who teaches this course. This class
turned out to be useful for understanding machine-learning algorithms.

I’ve finished Udacity’s online machine-learning engineer nanodegree. I also
interned at Nvidia, in Santa Clara.

\-----

The opportunities available for self-education now are just fantastic.

Kudos to all those involved.

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maruhan2
Wait. So, a high school student interned at Nvidia?

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tomcam
Don't know if it's still the case but when I was at Microsoft in the late 90s
this was common, and they were given real work.

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KGIII
Is there something more to the kids being software prodigies? When I was
young, there weren't that many. If there were, they didn't make the news.
Today, it seems like they are more frequent and that many are in software. Has
there maybe been a societal change that allows more to blossom?

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MaxLeiter
Broader access to technology? There weren't many online courses or cheap
computers 10 years ago

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KGIII
After I typed it, I thought about the price aspect. Prodigies that made the
news, back when I was younger, often came from wealthier families. Today,
prices are quite low for a bunch of things.

That does count as broader access, methinks. So, I suspect you're right. There
are many, many sources of inexpensive education. I don't know if that would,
statistically speaking, increase the actual numbers/percentages - but if it
doesn't, it would almost certainly enable them to go further.

Ever wonder what it'd be like to have had access to this stuff when you were
younger? Personal computers didn't arrive until I was an adult.

Anyhow, kudos on the kids. That is impressive and certainly better than I can
do.

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MaxLeiter
I can't really wonder what it'd be like to have access to this stuff - I'm 17
myself, and am from a moderately wealthy family in the Bay Area so have had
exposure to technology basically my whole life. I definitely think the culture
of the area and growing up with a computer in my room contributed to my
passion for tech.

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throwaway2016a
I mean this in no way to belittle the students accomplishments... certainly
they have done something that is extraordinary for highschool and something
even trained engineers might find difficult.

But one takeaway from this article is how amazing it is that open source, the
availability of hardware/electronics for reasonable prices, and open online
courses where people can learn at their own pace have all come this far.

It is incredible to me for instance what is out there for object recognition
algorithms and models now. And sensor hardware that used to cost thousands can
now be had for a few hundred dollars.

Again, kudos to these students. They deserve praise for what they
accomplished. But I am a little jealous I did not have access to what they
have when I was a kid :)

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matt_wulfeck
These types of headlines always remind me of The Pareto principle, in that 20%
of the effort will achieved 80% of the result.

Getting the last mile (no pun intended) is what’s extremely difficult and time
consuming, and what separates the novice from the master.

Good luck to these kids and their bright future. I hope they bring us the last
100% necessary for self-driving technology.

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cmontella
This is really cool; I'm glad to see this kind of technology reaching younger
students. In grad school, we actually built something similar for undergrads
to use as part of a robotics course. The idea was to give teams an identical
platform, and then race them at the end of the semester to see who did the
best job at programming it.

If anyone is interested, we open sourced all of the design files, with
instructions on how to build a car of your own for around $900 (at the time,
this was several years ago): [https://vaderlab.wordpress.com/roscar-robot-
stock-car-autono...](https://vaderlab.wordpress.com/roscar-robot-stock-car-
autonomous-racing/)

Here is a video of the results from the semester. One group was able to max
out the speed on the car, which at scale is equivalent to 128 MPH:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwRjv3D7lGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwRjv3D7lGo)

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tomcam
What a fantastic resource!

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yeukhon
Worth noting FRIST Robtics competition is also a great place to get students
involved in STEM and involved in team building, since running a FIRST team
requires fundraising, design logos, order t-shirts, promote team event, so
there are things for students who are not interested in the engineering part
to do too, while learning more about STEM. Also parents are usually involved
too... so more bonding time and more school-parent engagement.

I co-founded FIRST Robotics team in my high school (all started because I
wanted to run a club for college app lol). Then the following year after we
won the All-Start award, our school created an “engineering program”, and our
teams (yes, teams), battle with other nearby teams :) in NYC during off
season.

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iancarroll
In Michigan, the lack of regulation around autonomous testing can be great. At
first, you just needed a $30 manufacturer plate to do autonomous testing
anywhere in Michigan, but I'm pretty sure they recently got rid of that
requirement.

Level 2 autonomy is not exceedingly difficult to achieve either. If your car
has LKAS/ACC or similar features you can port something like openpilot[0] over
to your car.

[0]
[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot)

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rjeli
comma employee here - we have bounties for a handful of cars!

[https://comma.ai/bounties.html](https://comma.ai/bounties.html)

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danjoc
I love this story. I hope the snobs at r/machinelearning get a good read of
it. I've seen HS kids there ask questions and get talked down to instead of
encouragement. Those people want to keep ML their exclusive little club and
apply intimidating terminology to simple concepts to keep people out. Congrats
to these kids. Middle fingers in the air to the snobs.

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corporateslave2
This is so true. The difference between an ml expert and a novice is often
less than a few percent on accuracy.

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irq11
the difference is that the novice is nearly always combining models and code
written and trained by the expert.

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adamnemecek
I know this is off topic but I've been recently digging into geometric
algebra. Boy is linear algebra a shit algebra compared with GA. It's
particularly well suited for computer vision and what not. So check it out
whatever if you are trying to get into it. Things actually make sense!

