My Journey in the Tech World
Sixteen weeks coming to an end at last ,we can not help but recall the beautiful moments we had together,the challenges,the bugs of course,the goals and opportunities we pursued together(Data Science Nigeria,Python Conference Nigeria) as well as the motivations .
At first some of us were not sure whether we would be part of the survivors. Some started off with a really Optimistic mindset and got confused along the way.
The class on the very first Saturday started with introduction, learning Python Programing Language(which was actually easy and fun) and what Artificial Intelligence is really all about. We had very wonderful facilitators to handle that ,some of them which were Tejumade Afonja (co-organizer, AIsaturday Lagos), Daniel Ajisafe, Mujahid Rajiand Temiloluwa Ruth Afape (co-organizers and Ambassadors, AIsaturdays Ogbomosho).
While introducing deeplearning.ai, the specialization course by Andrew Ng, Daniel Ajisafe explained the potentials of Artificial Intelligence as the new electricity which can change lives. I related it to Africa , especially my local community. From his words, I felt I could touch lives around me too by increasing the education and awareness of Machine Intelligence.
Deeplearning.ai is a structured course with good content which uses a watered down approach (bottom up). The courses includes:
Neural Networks
Improving Neural Networks
Structuring Machine Learning Projects
Convolutional Neural Networks
A little about my background #smiles. I am an Agronomist ( Agricultural student #winks) with no prior knowledge of programming. But I love adventures and got interested in AI. You can see I did not start small, I went straight to the top of the stack.
Fast forward: The AI classes was fun all the way for me. It was more than solving programming assignments and learning new concepts; I had wonderful classmates. This was the magic Trick ! Learning is fun when you learn together.
In the first module, I learned how to train a neural network that could identify a cat. Furthermore, I was able to improve the performance of the net using better optimization algorithms.
I also learnt how to split the an entire dataset allocated for training into separate training set, development set and test set. A dev set is used to test different models, iterate but most importantly get the best model while a test set is used to get an unbiased performance/report of your best model. The results of test set is what you see in most papers. A lot of people confuse a dev set for a test set ( Trust me !) .
Moving forward, we caught the attention of a Machine Learning Research scientist working in Vietnam. He met with the entire team, reviewed some of our projects. Plus he gave us tips and tricks on how to build better AI models. Of course, I didn’t forget he mentioned frying rice oh mine ! Nigerians Abroad ! #eyesrolling.
Come to think of it, some dropped out along the way but most stood together to weather the storm. I can not help but recall part of the speech which was giving by Daniel Ajisafe (the mind behind AISaturdayOgbomoso ) which was “the race is not for the swift, brilliant, intelligent or exposed,the race is for the determined mind . A mind determined to see the race till the end while getting the most out of it”.
We had the opportunity to ask questions, interact with the facilitators, work as a group, share our knowledge amidst ourselves and personally do a presentation.
Thanks to AIogbomosho, I have grown as a lady. The community created a good platform to my first speaking opportunity. Two months after learning python from our first class , I gave my first talk on The impact of technology on Agriculture at the 2nd Edition of Python Nigeria conference.
I was also part of the first 75 student finalists that qualified for the 3rd all expense paid Data Science Bootcamp in Nigeria. Student attendees were selected based on pre-study courses and an inter-campus Machine Learning kaggle Competition. AIogbomosho is more than a group of students coming to learn AI skills, AIogbomosho is Family !
I can not help but thank our sponsors who made this journey a very successful one.Thank you so much Intel and others who supported us along the way. A very big thank you also to our wonderful tutors (Mujahid Raji and Daniel Ajisafe) who believed in us and did not give up , who sacrificed a lot to see that we are where we are today, thank you so much.
The 16th week of @AISaturdayOgbomoso ended with an hangout at the Botanical garden in LAUTECH. We had a lot of fun together and discussed the impact we are about to make on the world in various sectors with the knowledge we have acquired .