For the 5th year in a row, the Minnesota Center for Financial and Actuarial Mathematics (MCFAM) within the University of Minnesota’s School of Mathematics is hosting Machine Learning (ML) Summer Camps for high school students. Like last summer, the camps will be held virtually. The three different weeklong camps are co-sponsored by MCFAM, the School of Mathematics and the School of Statistics.

Campers in 11th and 12th grade benefit from a mix of formal instruction on ML concepts and learn techniques and coding in Python in small group projects, ranging from breast cancer diagnosis algorithms that predict benign and malignant tumors to predicting the winner of Pokémon.

At the end of each day, campers meet with guest speakers and gain insight on how ML methods are used by local companies such as Securian, C.H. Robinson, US Bank, Travelers, 3M, and Amazon. Even in the pandemic, last year’s campers said they were “very excited by the opportunity to connect remotely with other high school students (both locally and nationally) who share our same interests.”

Dr. Melissa Lynn, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics at Gustavus Adolphus, was one of the instructors of last year’s camp and will be an instructor again this year. Having been involved in this camp for 5 years, she said that for her, “the highlight is getting to watch the students’ presentations at the end of the camp. I am always impressed by how much they learn in only five days, and it is great to see them put it to practice on real datasets!”

MinneAnalytics members can look for opportunities to volunteer and to register their kids for the camps.

Camp Dates:
June 14-June 18: Girls Only Camp (Girl-Identified, nonbinary, transgender girls)
June 21-June 25: All Genders Camp
June 28-July 2: Advanced All Genders Camp

For all the details, visit the Machine Learning Summer Camp webpage.

If you’d like to learn about volunteer opportunities, contact Dr. Gary Hatfield at garyh@umn.edu.