The virtual fair e-KLESF (Kuala Lumpur Engineering Science Fair) reached its sixth day on 17 December 2022. It was organised via Zoom and Facebook Live.

The annual virtual fair was held from 9 to 11 December 2022 as well as 15 to 18 December 2022. It offered a vast variety of free webinars, quizzes, competitions, workshops and activities for participants to experience the fun of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) with the aim of nurturing and inspiring young and innovative minds.

The day six of e-KLESF 2022 kicked off with a webinar titled “AI is actually studied in secondary schools! Are you aware?” presented by TAR UMT Faculty of Computing and Information Technology Senior Lecturer Dr Tan Chi Wee. During the webinar, Dr Tan shared some trivia regarding AI and the topics taught in secondary schools that have direct relationships with AI. “AI can be viewed as the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines. The keywords are ‘human intelligence’. It is not something new as people have been trying to transfer human’s cognitive capability to machines,” explained Dr Tan about AI. Before diving further into the realm of AI, he shared a fun fact with the participants, saying, “People generate data all the time. The data generated worldwide by people were estimated to be 44 zettabytes (44,000,000,000,000) in 2020. This explosive growth will only get more rapid due to modern technologies such as Internet of Things (IoTs), AI and Data Science as years go by.”

AI has become a common term for the public as a diversity of commercial products are incorporated with it. Mobile applications like social media apps, web browsers and even the photo gallery are assisted by AI technology. Aside from commercial products, AI has also become ubiquitous in various systems. A few popular examples are the AI image generator and AI emotion detection system. Moreover, Dr Tan shared a peculiar yet interesting case in which an AI predicted pregnancy in a 17-year-old woman one month before her actual pregnancy. The said AI was created by one of the largest United States retailers, Target Corporation, as a solution to understand and predict woman’s buying behaviour. “This kind of AI system is common nowadays. It basically analyses a customer’s buying behaviour based on the products bought previously by the customer. Maybe the young woman started buying products like vitamins, pregnancy test kits, or even folic acid, leading to the system’s prediction,” stated Dr Tan when clarifying the AI case.

Among the subjects taught in secondary schools, mathematics has the closest relationship with theories of AI. The first one introduced by Dr Tan was a mathematic topic, matrices, which is usually taught in Form 5. Since AI operates most of the time on a lexicon of numbers as its main language, it is not strange for people to assume it also views images as a set of numbers. They do translate images to sets of numbers just like the format of matrices. With its numerical capability, AI has the ability to process and alter the aesthetic aspect of an image by modifying the numbers in the pre-assigned set of numbers of an image. Dr Tan enthused that the process is rather simple, as an AI just needs to use the basics of mathematics such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to process the numbers to achieve its desired results. According to him, the modifying of numbers can be done through various different calculations and solutions, therefore different companies or individuals have their own unique models to achieve artificial glamour.

Other secondary school’s mathematic topics discussed by Dr Tan which are directly linked to AI techniques were Form 5’s network graph, Form 4’s linear law, and Form 4’s dependant events. In navigation applications like Google Maps and Waze, the method used to measure and predict distance between routes bears great resemblance to the technique utilised in network graph. For linear law, AI uses the concept of linear regression in the scenario of machine learning in which the AI predicts a value with multiple variable data provided by a person. AI is also used in other areas, particularly in the area of linguistics. The concept of the mathematic topic, dependant events, is vastly used in AI’s natural language processing (NLP) in which the AI uses probability theory to seek the appropriate combinations of words to form a morphologically and semantically appropriate sentence by analysing and predicting the classes and functions of every word in a sentence.

Before concluding his webinar with a fun quiz, Dr Tan shared his statement regarding the implicit early exposure to AI in secondary school. He said, “AI actually comes into our life in secondary school through subjects like mathematics, additional mathematics and physics as well. There are so many useful instances in which AI can be used. AI is our future and the future is now.”

Besides Dr Tan’s webinar, the day 6 of e-KLESF 2022 also included another six insightful webinars on various topics of STEM. They were “Teknologi satelit dalam kehidupan” by Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) academic Dr Norilmi Amilia Ismail; “My 15-year journey of chemistry research” by Tunghai University of Taichung academic Dr Ching Tat TO; “Updates on injury in sports” by UTAR M. Kandiah Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Head of Department of Physiotherapy Muhammad Noh Zulfikri bin Mohd Jamali; “The relevancy of animation in the industry” by TAR UMT academic Mohamad ‘Abid Safwan bin Mohamad Taib; “The art and science of remembering” by UTAR Centre for Foundation Studies (Sungai Long Campus) academic Catherine See and lastly “Turbocharge your brain power – Achieve results 5x faster” by Memory Vision of India Director Anant Kasibhatla.