Parth Sarin: Boosting Access to AI Education

By Beth Jensen

Education has always been an oasis for Stanford’s Parth Sarin. The master’s student in computer science grew up in conservative College Station, Texas, where they often felt ostracized from their own community.

“I remember my time there as being exceptionally violent,” Sarin says. “There was so much verbal violence and vitriol directed towards queer folks and immigrants, especially after the 2016 election. Experiences like that made me afraid to think about who I am and what my values are, because I was afraid of being attacked in the same way I saw others being attacked.”

Sarin found respite both at school, where a series of dedicated teachers provided encouragement, and – eventually - in the larger community, which supported Sarin and their family.?

?“The longer I stayed in College Station, the more I learned about the beauty and resilience of that community,” they say. “When a white supremacist came to speak in town, there were protests and a fierce display of resistance; I felt very proud of my city. But my dad wouldn’t allow me near the protest. I was confused and hurt, but I’d come to understand that??as immigrants, my parents knew they risked potential abuse or retaliation from speaking out, and were willing to endure racism and bigotry in exchange for the opportunity to be in America. So I often watched from the sidelines as people – my people – became louder and more visible in their fights.”

Today Sarin is no longer on the sidelines. Committed to working for increased equity and inclusion for members of marginalized communities in their chosen field of artificial intelligence, they helped develop Stanford’s new CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources About AI For Teaching) project under the direction of Associate Professor Victor Lee in the Graduate School of Education with support from Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Stanford Digital Education, the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. Created in collaboration with a team of high school instructors working in under-resourced communities around the country, CRAFT makes it possible for teachers in any community – and in most disciplines - to incorporate AI instruction into the “nooks and crannies” of their regular curricula without the need for a separate class or expensive computer labs.?

Read: Bringing AI Literacy to High Schools

CRAFT is the latest teaching venture for Sarin, who is also a Tech Ethics and Policy Fellow at HAI this summer and an instructor for “CS 41: The Python Programming Language.” They first recognized their passion for education when they began showing buddies how to code at summer camp. Since then, they have sought out teaching opportunities that range from designing algorithms to help prosecutors in Brazos County, Texas evaluate the accuracy and fairness of their policies and approaches, to riding a bike from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., stopping along the way to teach about data science and math.?

“Learning provided me with a community at a time when I didn’t feel like I had one, and contributed to my conviction that education is a site for healing,” Sarin says. “It was a sanctuary, and I want to create that for other people.”

This article is part of the?People of HAI?series which spotlights our community of scholars, faculty, students, and staff coming from different backgrounds and disciplines.

Stanford HAI's mission is to advance AI research, education, policy, and practice to improve the human condition.?Learn more.