Lagos AI Hackathon #LagosAIHack— 2nd Edition
On the cool, rainy Saturday morning of 21st July, 2018 within the tech — hub of Lagos, “Yabacon Valley”, at the newly opened NG Hub from Facebook, another landmark event was taking shape and revving its engines. The 2nd edition of the Lagos AI Hackathon (#LagosAIHack) organized by the Women in Machine Learning and Data Science (WiMLDS), in collaboration with AI Saturdays Lagos was taking place and it promised to be another memorable one. We had InstaDeep, an international Artificial Intelligence company and Google Dev Experts and Africa’s Talking as sponsors this time too. The event delivered in the best ways, as were imagined — the great minds present, the hackers, the colors, the food, a beautiful contest and befitting emergent winners as well. #LagosAIHack had it all and here’s a narration of the events for those who missed it.
Registrations kicked — off at the door. As particpants were already registered via Kaggle submission, all they had to do was confirm that their details were correctly printed. Soon after, breakfast was available. Ruqoyya Sadiq, co — organizer of Lagos Women in Machine Learning and Data Science (WiMLDS) and Tomiwa Ijaware, rockstar Software Engineer then got the ball rolling. A brief introduction and background of the event was given while the terms of the competition were stated.
Karim Beguir, CEO and co-founder of InstaDeep then delivered a powerful keynote speech on the evolution of AI and the opportunities in Africa and in the world in general. His speech covered how AI is fast becoming the most viable and reliable means of creating solutions with Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning at the very core of this revolution.
He also touched on how Machine Learning and Data Science is gaining grounds in Africa sighting small communities like AI Saturdays Lagos and WiMLDS to big players like Data Science Africa and Deep Learning Indaba. The Deep Learning Indaba conference coming up in September, 2018 has 550 students attending and they are partnering with IBM, Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Microsoft and of course InstaDeep. Africa is practically an AI goldmine and the sooner we get in on the act and be on course, the better.
The competition then commenced. We had 10 participating teams. Each team consisted of at least 3 members. The task was simple — The teams were required to build a model that predicts the hourly taxi ride demand in New York City based on Population Census Blocks. The task creators (InstaDeep) had a baseline that served as extra incentive, to be beaten. The competition started at 10.40 am and ended at 6pm with a one hour break in between for food and drinks.
The InstaDeep baseline was unmatched nor beaten, however our winners emerged still. AITeam finished top of the log, Team_A1 were first — runners up and Bello — Tomi came in third position. As prizes, the winning team’s members will all get internships at InstaDeep and the runners — up all each got Google Home devices.
As stated earlier, the event was amazing and kudos to the spirit of sportsmanship on display amongst the teams. The event was to foster the growth of Artificial Intelligence through active participation and it more than achieved that among the participants on the day.
Again, we would like to give massive appreciation to our friends at NG Hub from Facebook, Tejumade Afonja, Femi Azeez, Ruqoyya Sadiq, Tomiwa Ijaware, Muthoni Wanyoike and Karim Beguir for a great job of organizing the event and also to everyone who was present and made the event a success. We are definitely looking forward to the next edition.
To see more pictures from the event, visit this link and if you have pictures too, do share!
