AI RC

Research & Competition

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🚀 AI Research & Competition （AI RC）Program Opens for Enrollment!
From Curiosity to Contribution – Explore AI Through Real Research

Ready to dive into the world behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude? This 5-week winter program (Sat & Sun, 12/23– 1/18) is designed for high school students with no prior experience required – only curiosity.

Led by AI researcher & ML engineer Tianyi Huang (Cleanlab, MIT CSAIL, App Inventor Foundation) and CMU Language Technologies researcher Michael Li, this course blends lectures, hands-on mini-projects, and real research tasks to help students:

✨ Understand how modern language models work
✨ Learn the academic research process — from idea to publication
✨ Read, analyze, and replicate cutting-edge AI papers
✨ Build LLM projects using PyTorch and LangChain
✨ Discover your own research interests and passion

Students will explore neural networks, embeddings, transformers, evaluation methods, and more – all within an authentic research context inspired by top AI conferences and Competition like IEEE, AAAI, ISEF, and STS .
If you're curious about AI, love problem-solving, or want to understand how real research happens, this program is your perfect starting point.
Join us and turn curiosity into contribution!

⭐ Why This Pathway Matters

Students must go beyond using AI—they need to understand it, analyze it, and create with it.

This pathway builds real AI research ability through a clear progression from interest → understanding → skills →Achievement → college & career advantage, helping 8–12th grade students grow into real AI researchers，even with zero prior experience.

Winter Camp Registration

Level 1 (AI RC 101)—101 Winter Boot Camp
Level 1 (AI RC 101) is a beginner-friendly foundational course designed for high school students who are ready to take their first step into the world of Artificial Intelligence. This program combines AI fundamentals, project-based learning (PBL), and a guided Capstone AI Project, enabling students to truly understand modern AI while building tangible work they can showcase.
By the end of the course, every student will complete a full AI Innovation Proposal aligned with the standards of the Presidential AI Challenge (Track I)—a nationally recognized competition hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Key Course Information
Grade Levels: 8–12 (No prior experience required）
Format: Live Online Classes (Led by instructors from top universities)
Schedule: 2 classes per week · 10 sessions total · 20 instructional hours
Course Dates: Dec 23, 2025 – Jan 18, 2025
Final Deliverable: A complete Track I AI Innovation Proposal ready for national submission
Tuition: $1880
Prerequisites: None

Course Overview
AI RC 101 introduces students to modern artificial intelligence through a structured, intuitive, and hands-on learning experience.
The curriculum helps students:
1) Build conceptual understanding of how AI models—especially LLMs like GPT—actually work
2) Develop early research literacy
3) Gain foundational engineering skills
4) Apply AI thinking to solve real-world problems through a Capstone project
This course is the first major step toward advanced AI research, competitions, and portfolio development.

Course Goals

By the end of the course, students will:

Understand the foundational math and intuition of NLP from a machine learning perspective, modeling language as a high dimensional vector space.
Learn how research works — from ideation to publication — including academic conferences/journals, the peer-review process, and paper writing.
Gain practical experience in analyzing AI research papers and building LLM projects using industry standard evaluation techniques and popular frameworks.
“Find your passion” — Discover personal research interests and evaluate whether AI or research is your true passion through uncovering what researchers and companies are actually doing with modern AI.

Course Modules
Module 1 — AI Fundamentals & Theoretical Understanding
Students learn:

What AI, Machine Learning, NLP, and LLMs truly are
Why models like GPT are powerful
How language is represented mathematically
Key ideas behind vector spaces, embeddings, and attention

Module 2 — Research Literacy & Problem Discovery
Students develop research habits by learning:How to read and interpret academic papers

How to identify key ideas and innovation points
How researchers discover problems worth solving
Basics of AI ethics, safety, and societal impact

Module 3 — Introductory Engineering Skills
Hands-on skills essential for future AI coursework:

GitHub setup and version control
VS Code basics and project setup
Completion of a small AI mini-project

Module 4 — Capstone AI Project
Students complete a full innovation proposal that includes:

Identifying a real-world problem
Designing an AI-driven solution
Evaluating feasibility, risks, and impact
Writing a complete, structured proposal aligned with Presidential AI Challenge standards

Technical concepts covered include:

ML/NLP Concepts
- ML basics: vector operations, loss functions, neural networks, gradient descent
- NLP basics: sparse word representations, tokenization, vector embeddings, cosine similarity, language modeling objective
- NN architectures: RNNs, LSTMs, attention, transformers
Popular Frameworks
- PyTorch
- LangChain

Value (What Makes Level 1 Unique)

Real Research Context: Students explore actual methods used in world-class AI conferences.
Language Model Frontier: Learn how the best LLMs to this day are trained, evaluated, and optimized.
Publication Insights: Understand why research papers matter, how to write one, and how ideas reach the global stage.
Tangible Final Outcomes : A national-level AI Competition Track I Proposal

Perfect for portfolios, competitions, and early research pathways.

2026 Spring Camp Registration

Level 1 (AI RC 101)—2026 Spring Camp
Spring Camp (AI RC 101) is the Spring term offering of our signature introductory AI research program, designed for students in grades 8–12 with no prior experience required. This course provides a comprehensive foundation in modern AI—covering core ML/NLP concepts, research thinking, paper analysis, and essential engineering tools such as GitHub and VS Code.

While the Winter Bootcamp focuses on completing the Presidential AI Challenge Track I Proposal, the Spring Camp replaces this with a hands-on Capstone AI Project. Students will build an introductory AI application or system, demonstrating their conceptual understanding and technical growth. This project can be used for future research pathways, competitions, personal portfolio development, or high-school academic showcases.

Key Course Information
Grade Levels: 8–12 (No prior experience required）
Format: Live Online Classes (Led by instructors from top universities)
Schedule: 2 classes per week · 10 sessions total · 20 instructional hours
Course Dates: January 31, 2025 – April 5, 2025
Final Deliverable: A complete Track I AI Innovation Proposal ready for national submission
Tuition: $1880
Prerequisites: None

The 2026 Spring Camp offers the full Level 1 AI RC 101 curriculum—covering AI fundamentals, research literacy, and engineering skills—without the Track I Proposal requirement, giving students a flexible and rigorous introduction to AI.

Level 2 (AI RC 201/202)—2026 Spring Camp
AI Hands-On Skills · Research Methods · Competition-Ready AI Projects

Level 2 (AI RC 201/202) is the next step after AI RC 101, designed for students who want to move from foundational understanding into practical AI development, applied research, and competition-level project building. This course strengthens advanced technical skills in Python, mathematics for ML, data analysis, and core machine learning methods while guiding students to design, run, and evaluate their own AI experiments.

Students will learn how AI research is conducted in practice—how to build models, analyze results, improve performance, and document findings professionally. By the end of the program, every student will complete either a full research paper or a competition-ready AI project, suitable for submission to academic showcases or AI competitions.
This course prepares students for advanced pathways such as AI RC Level 3 (Research Publication Track) and Level 4 (AI Elite Research).

Key Course Information
Grade Levels: 8–12
Format: Live Online Classes (Led by instructors from top universities)
Schedule: 2 classes per week · 10 sessions total · 20 instructional hours
Course Dates: Pending
Final Deliverable: A complete AI research paper, or A competition-ready AI project
Tuition:
Prerequisites: Level 1 recommended

Level 2 transforms students from AI beginners into hands-on researchers—equipping them with the advanced skills to build real models, run real experiments, and produce publishable or competition-ready AI projects.

2026 Spring Camp Registration

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📩 Contact Us

For questions or enrollment inquiries, please contact us at:

Email: powerupbootcamp@gmail.com

Organization: PowerUp Academy

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