STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Alexis Crowdson could have spent the summer hanging out by the river. But, instead, she spent two weeks at “camp” learning how to use artificial intelligence to determine the possibility of life on other planets.

Crowdson, a senior at Wood River High School, joined 13 other teens in the camp organized by Far+Wise as part of its new mission to expose Blaine County School students to trades like welding, firefighting, airport management and entrepreneurship.

“They showed us what AI is, how you can apply it in everything from Google Search to coding to using special key words for images,” said Crowdson. “I didn’t know anything about AI but we used it to figure out whether a planet might be an exoplanet. It was a fun and incredibly useful tool. And I learned that maybe people shouldn’t be as fearful about it as they are.”

The opportunity for an AI summer camp had its genesis in efforts by MIT and Stanford University graduate students to teach about AI to high school students around the country. Far +Wise was able to be nimble enough to take advantage of the course, figuring it dovetailed with its new trade camp program started last summer.

The Center for Career Exploration, as it’s called, exposes local students to a variety of trades and professions, such as airport management, the hospitality business, welding and entrepreneurship.

“The board approved the AI camp because AI is used in all professions now,” said Laura Rose Lewis, executive director of Far+Wise, formerly known as I Have a Dream Foundation-Idaho. “We saw it as a great opportunity because we don’t have AI instruction in the valley.”

Master’s students from Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley spent two weeks in the valley this month teaching the youngsters.

“I’m so excited about it I’m almost emotional. We had high school find good candidates and we funded the scholarships for them. We would’ve loved to have had more students but we couldn’t afford more,” said Rose Lewis.

On the last day of the camp, students invited their parents and Far+Wise board members to the Wood River High School Den where the students explained the project they’d been working on.

The project, they explained, focused on exoplanets, which are planets that orbit a star or stars other than Earth’s. NASA has found 5,400 of them so far.

Locating them can help answer such questions as: Are we alone? And, is there life on other planets?

Terrestrial ones, they said are earth-sized or smaller made of rock and metal. Some possess oceans or atmospheres—signs of habitability. Some are similar in size to Neptune and Uranus with hydrogen or helium-dominated atmospheres. Super-Earth exoplanets are more massive that Earth and may or may not have atmospheres. Gas Giants are as big or bigger than Saturn and Jupiter and may be scorching.

One way we detect exoplanets is by observing slight decreases in a star’s luminosity through transit photometry, with the decrease in the luminosity is proportional to the planet’s size, the students told their audience.

Using data from luminosity and wavelengths they can plot out the light fluctuations with graphs to determine which are exoplanets and which are not. Neural networks take a given set of imputs and assign a weight to them to support that conclusion. Convolutional Neural Networks allow scientists to determine images with computer vision.

Logistic regression involves a classification algorithm that gives a probability for something being an exoplanet or a non-exoplanet. And data augmentation involves artificially generating new data from real data. You can teach AI to make predictions based off different data, the students said.

Ryan Tenold, who played on the Wood River Valley soccer team that was invited to Manchester, England, last summer, said his father signed him up for the Artificial Intelligence Camp.

“I really had no interest in it before now, but I’ve learned that the coding part is really interesting,” he said. “By using artificial intelligence, we were able to determine that out of a group of 5,000 planets, about five were exoplanets. It might have taken months had we tried to figure that out by hand.”

MaryAnn Crowdson said she was delighted her daughter Alexis had the opportunity to attend the camp: “I drill her everyday after school about what she learned, and she’s ecstatic.”