Take an existing problem ("Track poachers"). Notice that elephants walk differently to humans, and that movement difference can be used to identify the difference even in lower res videos (surely there's simpler ways, like size and shape? It's plausible that gait is actually a better way though). Take an existing dataset, plug it into your favourite machine learning library, and run your model over a drone feed somebody else did 99% of the work for.
Handwave away that most of the cost in the drone is going to be in getting it decent range, not a decent FLIR camera. Add in a 5x bonus to media coverage because you're young, 5x bonus because you're a woman in STEM, say something about how important skin colour, demographics, and chromosomes are for doing some mediocre programming:
> “What I really realized from this is how important it is that women, people of color, all sorts of minorities in the field of technology are at the forefront of this kind of groundbreaking technology.”
And you've got some journalists writing about you and not something far more interesting and useful, because A. The journalists can somewhat understand it, B. You're under the age of 20, C. You're a girl in STEM, D. You're a minority, and E. It's about good animals being protected from evil poachers, giving it a nice simple narrative.
And I'm sure her winning that competition was totally about merit and not because they've got a mandated 50% women winning (and she's a minority, extra points!) and probably 5% of submissions are by women. Or maybe it's not? Maybe it was merit. Either way, implicit and explicit quotas mean that it's more likely than not, and my knee-jerk reaction to this is one of "she's there because she's a girl" and not "she's there because of merit". What fantastic efforts to get rid of stereotypes, right?
I'm around her age, I'm tempted to try to send something similarly useless to that competition and get $10 000. But why bother, when the first, second, and third place will inevitably be taken up by girls with useless projects going "It was so difficult to get here, all I had was exclusive help in the form of courses, programs, special treatment, and mentors all along the way and competing against 10% of the people for 50% of the spots"
Handwave away that most of the cost in the drone is going to be in getting it decent range, not a decent FLIR camera. Add in a 5x bonus to media coverage because you're young, 5x bonus because you're a woman in STEM, say something about how important skin colour, demographics, and chromosomes are for doing some mediocre programming:
> “What I really realized from this is how important it is that women, people of color, all sorts of minorities in the field of technology are at the forefront of this kind of groundbreaking technology.”
And you've got some journalists writing about you and not something far more interesting and useful, because A. The journalists can somewhat understand it, B. You're under the age of 20, C. You're a girl in STEM, D. You're a minority, and E. It's about good animals being protected from evil poachers, giving it a nice simple narrative.
And I'm sure her winning that competition was totally about merit and not because they've got a mandated 50% women winning (and she's a minority, extra points!) and probably 5% of submissions are by women. Or maybe it's not? Maybe it was merit. Either way, implicit and explicit quotas mean that it's more likely than not, and my knee-jerk reaction to this is one of "she's there because she's a girl" and not "she's there because of merit". What fantastic efforts to get rid of stereotypes, right?
I'm around her age, I'm tempted to try to send something similarly useless to that competition and get $10 000. But why bother, when the first, second, and third place will inevitably be taken up by girls with useless projects going "It was so difficult to get here, all I had was exclusive help in the form of courses, programs, special treatment, and mentors all along the way and competing against 10% of the people for 50% of the spots"