From Oct. 9 to Oct. 13, juniors Caroline Rafferty and Sophia Weber represented the United States at the NextGen AI international summit in Naples, Italy. At the summit, students and delegates from more than 20 countries discussed the impacts and uses of AI, learning from professors and experts around the world.

To select student representatives for the trip, Principal Jennifer Fong said she went through a strict application process, looking for students with leadership experience and strong communication skills.

Rafferty said she wanted to go on the trip because of her interests in AI and her desire to meet students from other countries.

“AI is really interesting, and I kind of wanted to share my views on it and also learn about other people’s views around the world,” Rafferty said. “And I also feel like when I’m older, I might want to do something with international relations since I love meeting people from other new countries.”

Throughout the summit, Fong supervised the students during meals and provided updates. On top of this, she also met with other representatives to learn how countries utilize AI in education.

“One of the things I learned is that it seems like other countries, in terms of AI and education, are much more advanced in their thinking about what they’re going to do,” Fong said. “Not every country, but some of the countries, there are a lot of international resources about how to use AI in schools.”

On the other hand, Rafferty said she learned how AI is implemented into other areas of life, such as cuisine, music, and dance.

“I learned that it’s implemented into a lot of different things. For example, it can be used in cuisine, to create new recipes and stuff,” Rafferty said. “… I also learned that they use AI music. They had several dances done using music made from AI and like dance moves created by AI, which was really interesting. I did not know they could do that.”

Throughout the summit, Rafferty and Weber also got to meet other representatives. However, according to Weber, communication was sometimes challenging because she and Rafferty could not speak Italian fluently.

“Me and Caroline spoke a little bit of Italian, but it was kind of hard trying to communicate with people who spoke absolutely no English, because our Italian isn’t very developed,” Weber said.

Despite the language barrier, Rafferty said she was easily able to connect with the many English-speaking representatives from international delegations.

“Everyone got along so well, I was kind of surprised by that, because you wouldn’t think these people from Japan, Argentina, completely different sides of the world. But everyone got along so well and had a great time together,” Rafferty said.

After the summit, Fong said she believes students in the United States need to keep up with rapid advancements in AI and their impacts on jobs.

“So that way students choose something in college that recognizes that AI has a major impact, whether it’s replacing some things that we normally do that will no longer exist or innovating using AI,” Fong said.