Artifical Intelligence has existed for quite a long time, but its advance only became to the level it is today about a couple years ago; when AI became far more advanced with technology such as ChatGPT or generative image AI. I became far more invested with AI technology at this time, and wanted to find ways where I can explore it further. I was already in some activities such as my school’s Machine Learning club, but I wanted to explore it more than what my school could offer me.
This is how I ended up finding out about the International Conference On Artificial Intelligence, or ICOAI. By applying to it, I would get the chance to research on a topic relating to Artificial Intelligence, and then writing my first ever research article. This was a big opportunity for me; it would be my first time getting to write a research paper in an academic conference, and on a topic that I was heavily invested in at that.
There was one problem initially; because of my age, I would have to work as a co-author for another participant instead of working on my own article fully, which was a slight setback. While it did feel somewhat disappointing that I did not get to work on my own paper fully, I was still excited to go through the process of learning more about Artificial Intelligence and writing a paper about it.
I was to work with a senior student and another professor on the topic of using Artificial Intelligence to predict the trends in the stock market. During the research process, I learnt a lot of things about it that I never really knew before; every bit of evidence had a deeper meaning that you could hypothesize, and any information was vital to put as it could drastically change the meaning. It was quite challenging to work on the research paper and gather data, bur at the same time my passion allowed me to keep going through all the hard work and contribute to the research paper.
It was only after the paper was done when a drastic change in the course of events occurred; the main author had to quit for personal reasons, and thus handed the job of presenting the paper at the conference to me. This sudden change was quite a double edged sword. On one hand, this was an exciting opportunity; I would get to present what I’ve worked on for months to the world myself, in a big conference. On the other hand, this was also nerve-wracking as it was going to be a more formal event than I had ever worked in, not even considering the presentation I was going to have to do. I did not anticipate this to occur after the start of the project, so I had a lot of preparing to do.
So, my preparation work started. There was one core issue with my presentation; even though I knew what to say and was confident in my topic, I was not a very good presenter. I had a difficulty speaking up around people no matter what the topic was, which was something I was obviously going to have to work on in the upcoming weeks to try and remedy. This was the main hardship I faced during the preparation for the conference; I had to teach myself how to be confident in front of other people. It’s a struggle that is very real for many people such as me.
The key element to getting out of this fear was to focus on my passion on the subject and use it to feel more confident in my speech in front of an audience.
