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The Curriculum Team @ The AI Education Project
What anime should you watch next?
This project was designed to help you decide what anime might be a good fit for you. It can be hard to figure out which anime to watch because there are so many options on the market. We wanted to be able to recommend an anime to someone even if they had never watched anime before. We felt this would be a good project for artificial intelligence because we can crowdsource recommendations and see what other people enjoy. Then, we can use their personal characteristics to recommend an anime to a new person. There are some hidden patterns in anime recommendations! It may not always be obvious who to recommend what to. Our research showed that some people stop watching an anime because they find the jokes bad or becomes it wasn't what they expected. We included that question in our survey and it turned out to be the most impactful question in figuring out which anime might be a good fit for you. We also had to keep the recommendations PG or PG-13, for obvious reasons!
The data for this model was collected on Amazon's Mechanical Turk! Mechanical Turk allows you to get a lot of survey responses quickly by paying people for their time. People can make a bit of extra money by completing short tasks while they ride the bus to work or wait for a friend, or even just to avoid boredom. You must be 18 years or older to be a worker.
Data privacy: we were very wary of potentially asking people personal questions. While some questions can seen innocuous at first, they might actually be taken very seriously by the person answering the survey. Our questions tried to avoid personal information where possible and data was collected anonymously through a Google form that did not require a sign-in.
Bias: while this is a fairly lighthearted topic, we were aware of the potential for bias in our AI model because that could lead to a bad experience for the person using the app. People would expect to get a good recommendation for them when in fact they didn't enjoy the anime we suggested to them. Everyone who took the survey on Mechanical Turk is over the age of 18, so any high schooler taking this survey might not get accurate results. As well, we were limited in the amount of data we could collect, so we only have about 100 responses. We were satisfied with how accurate the model was, but it turned out that a lot of people chose Pokemon, so the survey wasn't as accurate for non-Pokemon responses. It could help to collect more data.
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The curriculum team includes Cristina, Ehrik, and Isabel! You can learn more about The AI Education Project at aiedu.org.