Skyline student presents research at international AI conference
AI researchers often have doctorates. But this Sammamish student did not need one.
On Dec. 7, Skyline High School student Mansur Ali Khan, 17, presented his research on AI legislation at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Conference in San Diego. Every year, NeurIPS brings together the world’s top AI researchers and professionals.
Khan was getting ready for school at around 6 a.m. when he received an email with the news that his research paper had been accepted into NeurIPS.
“I opened my phone and saw the email, titled something about the results for the paper. The second I opened and saw the word ‘congratulations,’ I was really excited,” Khan said.
Khan was mentored by his two co-authors, MIT graduate Mehmet Efe Akengin and Stanford researcher Ahmad Rushdi. Their paper explored a gap in AI-related legislation in the United States. The research found that several U.S. lawmakers are proposing bills to regulate AI but that the majority of them end up either stalling or failing in committee.
For Khan, getting to NeurlPS was a long process that involved a lot of work. Along the way, Khan recalled occasionally feeling discouraged, especially when he encountered roadblocks accessing and interpreting data. However, he said having a clear goal of informing the public about the gap in AI safety legislation encouraged him to persist.
“When we remembered this, our goal, we went through with labeling all our data, and just going through the research and not stopping until we found a complete result,” Khan said.
Their research paper was accepted into the Third Workshop on Regulatable Machine Learning, one of NeurIPS’s satellite events.
During the research process, a memorable moment for Khan was learning to blend both data science and political science. When his data-based approach repeatedly showed him that an AI bill with more co-sponsors was more likely to stall, Khan initially thought he was doing something wrong.
“That’s when we realized we should take a more interdisciplinary approach, and we realized that in political science literature, more co-sponsors in smaller niche areas means there is more disagreement among the legislators,” Khan said.
In addition to getting his research accepted into the conference, Khan was grateful for the networking opportunities. He enjoyed meeting experts in industry and academia and learned how they applied AI to their individual areas of research.
“Some people were focused more on its application in healthcare, some people were focused in education, some people were even looking at how AI can be used in [Formula 1] racing, so it was pretty interesting to see how broadly this field can be applied in so many situations,” Khan said.
Khan’s mother, Amna Suleiman, 37, is proud of her son. She appreciates that his hard work and effort were acknowledged in such a rewarding way.
“I watched him spend long hours reading, thinking out loud, and jumping around when he found something new,” Suleiman said.
