Participating in the first two stages of the KAUST AI Program
What I learned from 80 hours of artificial intelligence coursework, and what that meant for me.
In January and February 2026, I completed the first two stages of the KAUST Academy artificial intelligence program. I did not progress to the final stage.
What I worked on
With guidance from KAUST Academy TAs at King Abdulaziz University, I learned about supervised and unsupervised learning. In retrospect, these concepts helped me make more informed decisions about which technologies to use in later hackathons and my capstone project.
Across the two courses, I completed 80 hours of coursework in machine learning foundations, deep learning, supervised and unsupervised learning, computer vision, transfer learning, object detection, image segmentation, and exploratory data analysis. I completed the introductory course with Distinction.
What I took from the experience
That artificial intelligence is not for me. It just does not seem to bring me as much happiness as cybersecurity. That's completely fine, and I am glad I went through with it so that I could figure that out.