An Oak Brook teenager was recently honored with the prestigious Diana Award for her drive to diversify and make more accessible the field of artificial intelligence through her nonprofit organization, AInspire.
The award is given out by the England-based charity of the same name to recognize “outstanding young people selflessly creating and sustaining positive social change.”
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Jui Khankari, a 17-year-old Hinsdale Central High School student, founded AInspire, to teach the applications of artificial intelligence, or AI, to students of all ages and backgrounds. Since launching in February 2020 and running entirely on donations, AInspire serves over 7,500 students in 58 countries with virtual workshops, videos and other online methods for students to learn about artificial intelligence, with a focus on its applications in health care.
Like any casual teenager, sometime in the summer of 2019 while bingeing Netflix and asking Siri for the weather, Khankari became fascinated by the inner workings of the artificial intelligence used to run such programs efficiently. “It was kind of a superficial interest at first,” she said. Khankari later learned of a summer internship program at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) which felt like the perfect opportunity to learn more and dig deeper.
Khankari approached the directors of Stanford’s Center of Advanced Functional Neuroimaging (CAFN), who were there to give a talk about AI to the 30+ girls at the program, for an internship opportunity at the lab. The “internship” didn’t actually exist, but she pitched herself anyway and locked it.
“She has a remarkable sense of enthusiasm and motivation to learn and contribute to the study of AI in medical imaging. She was always inquisitive about why and how our Deep Learning models worked and was also able to remotely audit and excel in our postgraduate courses during the quarantine,” said Michael E. Moseley, Ph.D., Professor of Radiology at Stanford University. “Jui will always have a home in CAFN.”
Part of Khankari’s ongoing research with Moseley and Dr. Greg Zaharchuk aims to help decrease treatment time associated with stroke.
According to Khankari, without the use of AI, if somebody suffering from a stroke is taken to the hospital, a series of scans first determines whether it’s a stroke. The scans are then sent to the radiologist, but there might be a queue of brain scans for the radiologist to read ahead of the potential stroke victim’s scan, delaying course of action.
“And this is the best-case scenario in an urban setting in a developed country. If it takes the radiologist an average of two minutes to read each scan, then it takes the radiologist 20 minutes to get to this patient’s scan, and another two to read it. This means the patient’s treatment has been delayed for 22 minutes. Each minute that treatment is delayed, the patient loses 2 million brain cells, so the patient has already lost 44 million brain cells by the time the radiologist finishes reading their scan,” Khankari explained.
“Now imagine if you had an AI plug in at that hospital that would read all of the scans in the queue and flag the scans that have a high probability of having a stroke. Then, that potential patient’s scan is the first in the queue to be read by the radiologist, and the treatment, for example, a clot busting drug like tPA (tissue Plasminogen Activator), will be given 20 minutes earlier — saving 40 million brain cells. This could be the difference between the patient walking out of the hospital or ending up permanently disabled or dead.”
Though it may come as a surprise, Khankari’s extensive knowledge of AI’s intersection with medicine is mostly self-learned through lab work and independent research.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as naturally gifted at computers,” Khankari said. With that in mind, she set out to make it accessible for those with a zero to basic understanding of the AI complexities.
“Even if you Google the definition of artificial intelligence it has all these really big words and it just makes it more difficult than it actually is,” she elaborated. “While I was self-studying and attending coding camps, I struggled to understand how it worked and how to actually pursue a career. I internalized this notion that I wasn’t smart enough to go into AI, but I don’t want other girls to feel that way.”
Khankari channeled the “not knowing” into diligent note taking on theories and technical skills associated with AI. When she creates AInspire workshops, she tries to make it palatable by stripping AI to its fundamental components.
As an example of how she makes it more accessible, she once asked a group of workshop attendees to use their own brains to differentiate between chihuahuas and blueberry muffins. “When we’re learning about neural networks, instead of going into how there’s waves and neurons, I get them to think about how your brain is differentiating the two based on patterns you picked up on; that’s how neural networks do it. You need to first develop an intuitive understanding of AI theories.” When discussing her research into stroke treatment, she described AI brain scans as “Google maps for the brain, with potential abnormalities labeled among brain “landmarks.'”
AInspire workshops — organized by Khankari with a group of an all-female leadership team — cover topics like Intro to AI + Biology, AI + Bioinformatics, Intro to AI + Biology + Art, a speaker series and more. Some workshops, like AI + Bioinformatics, recommend prior coding experience, but many, like Intro to AI + Biology, require absolutely no coding experience.
“One word that I like to keep in mind when I’m working on anything for AInspire, is I want to democratize access to AI education. And I want to do this so anybody, anywhere with access to a computer with internet connection can learn about AI,” Khankari added. “I really wanted to dispel this stereotype that AI is something that’s difficult to break into or that it’s too complex for anyone to understand.”
AInspire’s youngest student was a 2nd grader, but Khankari recently worked with a group of much older folks, too, after an article written by former Pioneer Press reporter, Chuck Fieldman, went global.
“It’s funny, in September (2020), the news story got picked up by an outlet in Switzerland called Swiss Cognitive. And it happened to be the most read AI news of the week,” Khankari said.
England-based Milton Keynes AI (MKAI), a relatively new nonprofit that strives to “integrate sustainable human values into artificial intelligence,” reached out to Khankari after coming across the article to propose a collaboration on a number of workshops for several of their business divisions.
“I agreed and then I told them that I can only meet after 3 p.m. to discuss because I go to school so they said O.K. But during the meeting, they asked me if I was done dropping my kids off at school and for a second I was so confused, ‘what do you mean dropping my kids off at school?’ And I said, I actually came back from school, I’m in school . . . ,” Khankari laughed, recounting the incident. “They thought I was an established professional!”
She custom created six workshops, pored over multiple hours of research and pre-workshop practicing to lead 100 business professionals in each session.
“I’m glad I was able to live up to their expectations . . . well, hopefully,” she said. Safe to say they were impressed — soon after, Milton Keynes nominated Khankari for The Diana Award.
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The award is the highest accolade in the UK given to young people between the ages of 9 and 25 for their social action or humanitarian efforts, according to officials.
The Princess of Wales’ belief that young people have the power to change the world is one of the guiding principles of the England-based charity.
“I’ve always been inspired by Princess Diana so being nominated for the award was a dream come true,” she said. “I’m just so grateful I’m able to advance even a minuscule part of her amazing legacy to inspire young kids.”
While the award ceremony was virtual because of the pandemic, something “super cool” happened — Prince Harry joined the Zoom.
Khankari hopes to take advantage of the mentorship opportunities that come with being a recipient of the Diana Award, especially as she hopes to further her research regarding AI to detect strokes.
“AI is intimidating for girls and I want to show them that it doesn’t have to be,” she said. “My motivation for starting Ainspire is really that I want AI to be the true equalizer that it was meant to be.”