S&E Undergraduate Programme of Summer Training and Research Track (UPSTaRT): Student Experience

Student: Prabuddha Hans

Year: 1^st Year

Course: LM121 BSc in Computer Science, Department of Computer Science & Information Systems

Supervisor: Dr. Muzaffar Rao

Title: Impact Of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Society

Objectives: Learning about how AI impacts our daily lives, learning about the impact of AI on businesses, learning about the benefits and risks of AI.

‘Hello there! My name is Prabuddha Hans. You can call me Hans for short. I am participating in The Science and Engineering Undergraduate Programme of Summer Training and Research Track (UPSTaRT scholarship programme), which involves doing research on the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in human society and drafting a report on it. Over the summer I have been researching topics like how AI can affect certain areas of our society.

An example of this would be how AI can help in cybersecurity by adapting to threats and identifying the domains that cybercriminals use via Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is a technique that AI uses to make sense of sentences and extract some use out of them. I have been learning terms and techniques like this over the summer as I did my research. I have also learnt about Neural Networks, these are pathways that allow AI to learn and make predictions work. The mathematical representations of Neural Networks, some formulae for data and techniques that are popular among AI for grouping data like the k-nearest neighbours method, have all now become familiar to me.

I am grateful to the Faculty of Science & Engineering here in the University of Limerick and my supervisor for letting me be a part of this programme. I feel it has helped me to prepare for my future years in Computer Science, as we look at AI and its inner workings.’