Beneficial AI
Often, we hear about the negative aspects of AI but less about the potential benefits. At The Citadel, our cadets displayed their talents in using deep reinforcement learning algorithms to have cars drive by themselves. In the near future, think of how beneficial to have cars that can autonomously transport persons with disabilities such as blindness or limb dysfunction or the elderly who can no longer drive by themselves. How about having driverless supply vehicles that drive by themselves in a military environment?
Thanks to the support of Amazon Web Services (AWS), we were able to host the first 2023 Senior Military College and Service Academy Warrior Week DeepRacer Tournament. Cadets from The Citadel, the U.S. Military Academy at Westpoint, and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis trained AI models to drive AWS DeepRacer cars all by themselves, or autonomously. DeepRacer is the name of the model car that has a video camera sensor to “see the road” and train an algorithm that can cause the car to drive by itself. The students train the cars virtually on a cloud-based simulator and then download the AI models to the DeepRacer car, which is used to drive the car on a real, or physical, race track. The algorithm they used was deep reinforcement learning.
AWS DeepRacer as an AI Autonomy Innovation Teaching Tool
Using DeepRacer as an AI teaching tool, is part of the autonomy innovation that our Center for AI, Algorithmic Integrity, and Autonomy Innovation, or AI3, hopes to bring to our students, community, and state. We hope that we can attract partnerships with major automotive companies in South Carolina, such as Volvo, BMW, and Mercedes to hire our students as interns and full-time engineers. We have also be partnering with AWS Machine Learning University’s AI Educator Enablement Program to put our faculty, include Dr. Pooya Niksiar, coach of our winning DeepRacer team, through Advanced AI and Machine Learning boot camps. This will prepare our faculty, and faculty across the U.S. at community colleges, HBCUs, and minority-serving institutions to teach machine learning at their institutions.
The Winning Team – The Citadel School of Engineering
Finally, I want to give a shoutout to Dr. Niksiar and his team of three cadets, Frederick Vogel, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Blakely Odom, Mechanical Engineering, and Brian Bradrick, Mechanical Engineering, for taking First Place and Second Place against their competitors. We thank the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy for their strong competition. We are happy that The Citadel School of Engineering can provide a world-class engineering education here in the low country and the State of South Carolina to serve our state and globe with principled leadership and engineering innovation.
Main Header Picture: Dean Andrew B. Williams, Dr. Pooya Niksiar (Coach), and Cadets Frederick Vogel (ECE), Blakely Odom (MECH), and Brian Bradrick (MECH), The Champions of the Inaugural Senior Military College and Service Academy Warrior Week DeepRacer Tournament
About the Author: Andrew B. Williams is Dean of Engineering and Louis S. LeTellier Chair for The Citadel School of Engineering. He was recently named on of Business Insider’s Cloudverse 100 and humbly holds the designation of AWS Education Champion. He sits on the AWS Machine Learning Advisory Board and is a certified AWS Cloud Practitioner. He is proud to have recently received a Generative AI for Large Language Models certification from DeepLearning.AI and AWS. Andrew has also held positions at Spelman College, University of Kansas, University of Iowa, Marquette University, Apple, GE, and Allied Signal Aerospace Company. He is author of the book, Out of the Box: Building Robots, Transforming Lives.
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