By A personalized Long Beach State chat bot, an MMA fight result predictor and facial recognition technology applications are just a few projects currently being worked on by students, for students at the AI Research Club.
Established in the Spring of 2024, the AI Research Club is a recent addition to the numerous clubs on campus.
According to vice president and fourth-year computer science major Shaun Lim, the club began as an idea with the former co-president Shrey Modi last spring, who has since graduated.
“We just wanted something to do with like large language models, generative AI,” Lim said. “So we just started coming up with ideas, and actually a big inspiration at the time for us was we heard that UCI had its own chatbot at the time, ZotGPT.
Lim said they figured if UCI could develop their own chatbot, then they could too. Designed around assisting Long Beach State students, the two came up with SharkGPT.
“We used a specific architecture that basically takes data from Cal State Long Beach’s websites and the chatbot reads that data whenever a person asks it a question,” Lim said. “It’s just like a super fast quick search for any Cal State Long Beach information.”
Lim says that SharkGPT can help answer a student’s question that may not be available if they were to search it up on their own. For example, if you were a computer science major interested in the data science industry, SharkGPT can give you a list of classes available at CSULB that would be relevant.
Other students, like second-year computer science major Keith Natakusuma, are also working on their own independent projects within the club.
“I was already working on an AI project for my interests, I’m particularly interested in MMA,” Natakusuma said.“I wanted to compare an AI model to my own picks, so I think it’s just the ability to consolidate things to a predictable outcome.”
With his project, Natakusuma seeks to learn how to use AI to predict the outcomes of MMA fights – a sport he said by nature, is super volatile and unpredictable.
Being a part of the club, Natakusuma said, has helped him learn how to navigate AI and apply it to his own project.
Natakusuma is also one of several club members currently working on developing applications with facial recognition technology, which the club began as a project this semester.
“We are planning to work on, hopefully, a mobile app and there are various topics that we’re still deciding on what to do with,” AI Research Club Teach Lead Soroush Mirzaee said.
Expanding on these topics, Club Treasurer Shrawak Shakya illustrated a few examples.
“We could do things like authentication – one of the ideas I had was authentication for hospitals, but we can’t really do that because it’s sensitive data,” Shakya said. “A more fun one is like music, so if you recognize someone’s emotion and based on that they play some type of song.”
Currently, club members are looking for the best application for the technology that is also feasible for the club to develop.
Mirzaee said that for the development of the application, they are going to use the open source software Flutter, which was developed by Google and is used in applications like Gmail, Google Photos, and the Google Play Store.
The club will also be using Google Cloud Services for the backend, which is code that runs on an application’s server not seen by users, in addition to data storage.
The purpose of developing facial recognition technology is so club members have a project to work on where they can learn about AI, and how they can use tools to develop it into an application that can be used in the real world.
“We’re really just trying to help people because AI is pretty daunting, even from a computer science perspective – like how does it work, you know,” Lim said. “I would say that the main motive is to inform more people on AI and basically demystify AI.”
