Journey into AI: Always expect a challenge

3 min readJan 22, 2018

After attending a NACOSS conference early last year and listened attentively to one of the key note speakers speak so friendly about artificial intelligence and the need for machine learning engineers and data scientists in Africa. My passion for AI from that moment started growing.

In other to know more about how this things work and to apply it to real world problems. I decided to join the speaker’s lab and learn the basics of AI.

I talked with the speaker and we entered into an agreement that I will be coming only on weekends since, I am currently a student except when we are on holidays that I will be coming everyday. He accepted and I was very excited always waiting for weekends and looking forward to holidays.

When I started my training that first week I discovered that I can not just jump into AI that there are prerequisites things like mathematics, statistics and python , even with that I was still passionate and excited about AI.

I followed my instructors guide, took online tutorials on some necessary mathematics, statistics topics and Python free course on Udacity.

Having used two months to do the prerequisites stuff, he administered a test on the three courses. God helped me I was able to pass all the tests. Also, I was qualified to under go the training. When my instructor said to me, “you are qualified for the training”, my heart was overwhelmed with joy and I was praying for the next weekend to arrive as soon as possible.

Finally, here is another weekend, I could remember I left home very early that Saturday morning without even waiting for breakfast. On getting there, he made me understand that my first lesson was to set up my environment which include downloading anaconda, installing it, creating different environment for python 2 and 3 , installing some python libraries that will be used for my first project. lastly, installing Jupyter notebook and understanding how it works.

Immediately , I downloaded anaconda from its official site. After that it was time to install . As a complete novice, I never knew how to use the terminal for installation and this was the very beginning of my trouble. I spent the whole of that day trying to install anaconda but I could not still install it . I kept on jumping from site to site to see how to solve this challenge which I did not expect, after four days I could not still fix it. At this point, my passion for AI started dying because of this unexpected challenge, I was no longer looking forward to weekends, my excitement was gone. I nearly quite the program if not that I got my mind made up but I want to say thank you to @Mathemandy an experienced android developer who helped me out. Since that moment I have always expected any challenge so long as it has to do with AI and ready to face it and move ahead.

HERE IS HOW TO QUICKLY INSTALL AND CREATE AN ENVIRONMENT IN ANACONDA USING CONDA ON UBUNTU 14.04 OR HIGHER.

Anaconda: This is a software that comes with conda, python and over 150 scientific dependencies.

Conda: This is an application that helps in managing packages and environments.

Prerequisites

Before you begin with this guide, you should have a non-root user with sudo privileges set up on your server. You can learn how to do this by completing Ubuntu 16.04 initial server setup guide.

Step one, download anaconda: https://www.continuum.io/downloads

Step two, open the terminal and run the following command:$ bash Anaconda-2.x.x-Linux-x86[_64].sh

After installation, you’re automatically in the default conda environment with all packages installed which you can see below. You can check out your own installed dependencies by entering conda list into your terminal