computer science pathways

an ACM Teach LA & LTA presentation :)

ACM Teach LA

A club at UCLA dedicated to giving all students access to CS education!

ashley (she/her)

• Second-year Linguistics and Computer Science Major
• Always been interested in language and linguistics, but wasn’t interested in academia/research, so looked into its intersections with CS! Many more careers here
• Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing
• Working on the development of AI using language data (This is NLP)
• Using computational methods to analyze language data and contribute to the linguistics field (This is CL)
• About Me!
• Social impact/making a space for POC in tech, experienced a lot of imposter syndrome (“CS for Social Good”)
• Listening to music in different languages, solving puzzles (coding and jigsaw), and spending quality time with my sisters!

arjun (he/they)

• Second-Year Computer Science Major
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning are rad
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• AI is all about getting machines to perform tasks that are considered to require human intelligence
• About me!
• AI involves a bunch of really cool math, but I didn’t really enjoy math till right before I started at UCLA
• AI research on intelligent graph processing
• Devoted to increasing representation in AI through youth outreach
• Activist for LGBTQIA representation and inclusion
• Love hiking, running, baking, and whistling

keertana (she/her)

• Second-Year Cognitive Science Major
• Always have been really interested in psychology and the brain but I also wanted to learn other things too (like CS)
• Offers a lot of flexibility with what you want to study or do career-wise
• User Experience Design (UX Design)
• Focuses on designing technology that takes into account what users would want
• I like thinking about how different types of people think
• A fun and creative outlet where you can add your personal touch on your creations
• Things About Me!
• Started off college as pre-med
• Passionate about affordably improving mental health on campus/everywhere!!!

leo (he/him)

• second year computer science major
• started in linguistics department!
• loves low-level systems programming
• the stuff in your car, airplanes, and alexa!
• the code that makes other code possible!
• has done
• web development
• systems administration
• got started writing cheat codes
• also
• 日本語学習者
• really enjoys music

sophie (she/her)

• First-Year Applied Mathematics Major
• Applied math = math + field of your choice!
• Computer science, business, etc.
• Why did I choose applied math?
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML)
• What is AI / ML?
• Examples:
• Siri’s speech recognition
• Tesla’s self-driving cars
• Why do I like AI / ML?
• Random Other Things About Me
• Java, C++, Scratch
• New(ish) to CS
• Women in tech
• Hometown: Chicago, IL
• I love running, baking, and fashion!

matt (he/him)

• second year computer science & math-economics
• professional experience in:
• web development
• app development
• embedded systems security (basically hacking into electronics)
• also done:
• game development
• robotics
• data science & machine learning (<3 Arjun)
• and…
• passionate about empowering people with computers & economics
• loves teaching and education!
• enjoys reading!!

what are some things you can do with computers?

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we’ll talk about three applications:

• AI & Machine Learning
• Web & App Development
• Systems Programming

Intersection of Math and CS

• Algorithmic problem-solving
• What is an algorithm?
• Simple real-world examples
• Runtime calculations
• Efficiency
• Save time and resources
• Applied math and AI/ML
• Face-detection, voice recognition, etc. = A LOT of data
• Statistics and optimization

• Cognitive Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• AI performs tasks that require human intelligence
• Can you think of a few common examples of AI?
• But… there’s a problem :(
• AI is not great at generalizing what it has learned from a few experiences
• Blue ball vs. red ball

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• Designing AI algorithms to help machines quickly generalize from a few experiences, without much guidance from humans, is at the heart of self-supervised and meta-learning

Train

Test

• Special case: contrastive learning
• How can a machine learn without help from humans?
• Solution: let the machine play Memory
• Task: want to build a model that can classify images of cats and dogs

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• Supervised learning: Model sees a ton of images of cats and dogs and humans help it learn how to classify
• Now, let’s say you have 1000000000000 images of cats and dogs but no human ://
• We play Memory!

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Model

Dog!

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

WEB & APP DEVELOPMENT

Design

Front-end

Back-end

Designing the visual style & theme of a site

Coding websites and adding interactivity!

Developing “servers” that collect data and do calculations.

UI & UX Design

MATT DOES STUFF

AND OTHER STUFF

SYSTEMS PROGRAMMING

Performant

Mission Critical

Rigorously Tested

High performance solutions to what we use everyday!

If your core code breaks, everything breaks.

Writing tests is just as important as writing code.

WHAT IS “LOW LEVEL”?

“hands-on” code

WHAT IS “LOW LEVEL”?

code that runs your computer!

WHAT IS “LOW LEVEL”?

code that powers reliable systems

Q: How did you first get into computer science and tech?

Q: What is it like learning computer science in college?

Q: What kinds of jobs involve computer science? Do they require CS degrees?

but we want to talk to you now!

ok, thanks for listening to us :)

What different kinds of diversity are there?

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(unmute yourself or type in chat)

Companies & researches emphasize that

diversity is a key part of innovation.

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Why do you think so?

(unmute yourself or type in chat)

And, ask us questions!

We don’t byte :)

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Stuff you can ask us about:

• Tell us more about this part of computer science!
• What is it like studying CS as a girl?
• What’s your favourite programming language?
• Is there overlap between CS and ___ subject?
• What do you need to know to be good at CS?
• Why is Arjun so cool?

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and… literally anything else!

that’s it from us!!!

thank you for listening :)

if you have any more questions, we’ll stick around for a bit.

and, feel free to send us an email and say hi!

Email: acmteachla@gmail.com

website: teachla.uclaacm.com

Question bank

Experience

• How (and when) did you get involved in computer science?
• Is it ever too late to start learning about CS? Am I behind if I don’t know about CS going into college?

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Diversity

• Do a lot of girls study computer science? What is it like to be a girl studying math/CS/STEM?
• Why is diversity important in CS? In STEM?
• How does diversity lead to innovation and better products?
• What kinds of diversity exist?

College & Jobs

• What is it like to learn about computer science as a non-CS/engineering major? Is it difficult? Do you ever feel behind?
• What types of jobs involve computer science?
• If I *do* come into college not knowing about CS but I want to get more involved, what can I do? (i.e. organizations, workshops, etc.)
• Do I need a CS degree to have a job in tech?

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Technical

• “What is ‘low level programming’? How is it different from ‘high level programming’?”
• What is your favorite programming language?
• What kinds of overlap are there between CS and other fields?
• Do I need to be good at math to study computer science? What about physics?

attribution slide :)

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