A big congratulations to the Kent Artificial Intelligence Lab (KAIL) Team, as they placed the 5th place among 3,291 competing teams in the TGS Salt Identification Challenge, where teams aimed to segment salt deposits beneath the Earth’s surface. The challenge was offered by TGS, the world’s leading geoscience data company. They hosted this opportunity for members of Kaggle, an online machine learning community, to help build an algorithm that would accurately identify and locate natural resources such as oil and gas by investigating salt bodies’ positions.

The team, led by Alexander Liao ’20 and Aaron Mao ’19, with a couple of other talented programmers outside the school, put in a lot of effort to complete the challenge. This marked a great start in showcasing the talents of KAIL, encouraging further engagement in artificial intelligence for high school students.

The KAIL lab was recently founded in May by Alexander Liao ’20, Aaron Mao’19 and Paul Xu’18. KAIL doesn’t just include members from Kent School but also gathers AI enthusiasts from all over the world. Members coming from as far as England, South Korea, and China communicate through an online platform, sharing their knowledge and interests. Mao hopes that this lab will serve as a platform for AI enthusiasts all around the globe, permitting everyone to share knowledge for beginners to advanced programmers. Moreover, they hope to further collaborate with people with the same interests and participate in challenging competitions.

Well-known for his programming skills, Liao spent up much of his free time coding and tackling the challenge. He said, “It’s not just having fancy equations, we are using the theories, papers to actually get it working in the industry.” He considers this challenge to be a wonderful workshop to improve his coding skills as well.

Recognizing that most high schools don’t have a comprehensive computer science program to support students in this field, as well as that many still view computer science as a hard subject to tackle, Liao and Mao were inspired to start this community. Thus, they hope KAIL will broaden and open up more opportunities for high school students to participate in challenges, both internationally and locally. Artificial intelligence permeates through various other fields and industries, including language, astronomy, biology, geology, or maths. No matter if you are a beginner or at a more advanced level who would like to conduct research, Liao believes that “it’s just for everyone”.