Acorn Aspirations
Acorn Aspirations is an award-winning startup that aims to empower young people to explore innovative technologies in VR, AR and AI to produce solutions to global challenges. Since its inception in 2015, Acorn Aspirations has organised over 15 hackathons, 3 accelerator programmes, 2 bootcamps and a conference, which had over 2,500 young people aged 12-18 co-create with mentors from Universities including London Business School, Imperial College, Kings College, UCL and some of the UK’s leading start-ups. The young participants came from diverse backgrounds including London’s most underprivileged boroughs, such as Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Tottenham Hale, Barnet, Camden and Southwark. Over 50% of Acorn Aspirations community are girls.
Acorn Aspirations has been selected as Winner of the CogX AI Innovation Awards 2017 and Google Developers Launchpad Accelerator, as well as finalist of MassChallenge. Acorn Aspirations is now looking to grow across the UK and globally impacting many more young people, particularly through its newest initiative Teens In AI (www.teensinai.com) which was launched at the UN AI for Good Summit in May 2018.
To learn more:
www.teensinaicom
http://acornaspirations.com/about-us/
About Teens In AI:
Teens In AI is an Acorn Aspirations initiative and was launched at the UN AI for Good Global Summit. It exists to increase diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence. The aim is to democratise AI and create opportunities for underrepresented talent globally through a combination of expert mentoring, talks, workshops, hackathons, bootcamps and accelerators, company tours and networking opportunities that give young people aged 12-18 early exposure to AI for social good. The vision is for AI to be developed by a diverse group of thinkers and doers advancing AI for humanity’s benefit.
