The AI Camp of 2023 was held at the Athalassa Campus of the University of Cyprus in Nicosia during the period 6-8 June 2023. Twenty-one students participated together with tutors from the University of Bologna and the University of Cyprus. In addition, other interested members of the University of Cyprus were invited to attend.
The organization of the AI Camp started in January 2023 when the universities discussed and decided the main structure of the event following the guidelines of the course within the design of the MAI4CAREU master/track programmes. These guidelines stipulated that the general aim of the AI camp is to offer to the students experiences brought together from the network of the project and help the different components of the project bind more closely to each other. In particular, the objectives are:
- Raising the awareness that students are studying in an EU wide program.
- Students learning to collaborate at a distance in a multi-national group.
- Improved social skills of students and how to present and to defend their research in an international community of peers and experts.
Following this it was decided to set up student groups whose members would come from the different universities to work, in the months before the AI Camp event, on AI projects. Hence a list of such projects was agreed by the partners and students from the various universities were asked to show their preference in working on these projects.
Each project group was assigned a tutor from one of the participating universities. Groups met online with their respective tutors and started their work. All groups worked successfully and submitted their report to the tutor and in turn to the AI Camp organizers in Cyprus on time, the week before the event.
The presentation of these projects from the student groups formed the main part of the program of the meeting. Each group had 30-40 minutes to present their project. Presentations were followed by special open discussion sessions where other students and other participants asked questions and/or commented on the work. The program also contained a visit of the students to two AI research centers, CYENS and KIOS, where students were presented with (some of) the work of these centers, in most cases with demonstrations of systems resulting from their work.
Importantly, the program included an “Industry Career Session” where representatives from seven different companies presented their AI related work and discussed career prospects with the students.
The event closed with a “Feedback Session” where the students were asked to fill in anonymously an online evaluation questionnaire. This was then followed by an open discussion where the participants expressed their general opinion and recommendations about the event. The event was generally well received, and suggestions were made that can improve it for next year.
The seven tutors were also requested to fill in a questionnaire about their experience regarding the first AI Camp and to make suggestions for improvements. All seven tutors indicated that they were overall satisfied, three indicating extreme satisfaction.
Some photographs of the event are given below with the permission of the participating students. Overall, the experience was positive and hence the first AI Camp lived up to its expectation of providing important added value to the students’ educational experience. This added value is multi-dimensional, as it covers transnational teaming and related soft skills, the parallel acquisition of hard skills through the challenge of investigating cutting-edge research topics in AI, and the opportunity to learn about AI career prospects in industry and research organizations. The feedback received from the participating students and their tutors includes valuable suggestions for improving future AI Camps and these suggestions will be taken on board since the joint objective of the academic partners is to continue to have AI Camps beyond the duration of the MAI4CAREU project and to self-fund these. Moreover, future AI Camps will be scheduled so that student participation can be widen including students from all partner universities.
