The Journey So Far — AI Saturdays Lagos
~In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take ~
I had the privileged to co-organize AI Saturdays ( an initiative to help people be a kickass in AI by going through course materials and building AI projects ) in my local community, Lagos Nigeria where we met every Saturday from 6th of January till 21st of April making it a total of 16 meet-ups (10am — 5pm).
Our Curriculum
The curriculum followed was drafted out by the brilliant people of nurture.ai. We made some modifications to match our audiences’ level of experience.
Throughout the period of AI6 Lagos’s first cohort we have managed to document and contribute 13 articles to AI6 Medium publication. We hope people who are thinking of organizing similar study group can read and be inspired enough to start.
🔗 Classification of Nigerian Currency Notes
👙 Week8 — Break
🔗 May The Tensor Flow with YouWeek10
🔗 Ancentral Intelligence with Granny Theano
🔗 Karessing Deep Leanring with Keras
🔗 Nervana Neon: The Fastest Framework Alive
Our Strategy
We really didn’t think we would be able to pull this meet-ups off because of all the things we couldn’t stop thinking might go wrong but once we were able to sort out the venue, every other things felt do-able.
Usually, our checklist for each week are
☑️ Venue
☑️ Content Delivery
☑️ Internet
☑️ Feeding
Checklist after each class
❎ Feedback form
☑️ Medium Article
❎ Engagement on AI6 forums
Somehow we end up not sending in feedback form as intended and not making as much contribution to the AI6 forums where all the interesting conversations happen :(
Our Observations
The sessions in AI6 curriculum is in 3 parts
✳️ Deep Learning for Coders
✳️ Computer Vision
✳️ Technical Paper Discussion
The most difficult part to stay consistent with was — ehm, you probably guessed it. Number 3. We had some struggles with 1 as well because the contents were for Intermediate and not for beginners. This made it difficult for most of the members to comfortably sit though a 3 hrs course without losing interest in it.
For these two session, what we eventually did after observing the pattern for a few weeks was to skip through the videos and Femi giving a gist of what that week’s topic was all about.
We also noticed that even though the materials are meant to be reviewed before the class, we all know how the week sort-of disappear right in front of you and wholla it’s Saturday again.
So, most of our members hardly go through the contents which makes it harder for them because they’re being exposed to the content for the first time. That begged for a retaining strategy 😃 we didn’t wan’t our members disappearing because they were bored or couldn’t keep up.
The retaining strategy was forming groups named after 5 notable deep learning frameworks
📌 PyTorch
📌 TensorFlow
📌 Theano
📌 Keras
📌 Neon Nervana
The challenge was to understand your framework and explain it to the class along with your group member. I’m proud to say that their presentations exceeded what we had in mind. So proud of all the group members for going extra miles for their presentations.
🎵 What Next?
AI6 second cohort starts July/August.
However, we are excited to announce our bi-monthly meet-up starting on 12th of May where we will focus on:
🔧 Hands-on TensorFlow
🔧 Hands-on PyTorch
🔧 Possible Project Discussion
To RSVP: http://meetu.ps/e/FdmcD/zm9XV/f
Our Appreciation
To all AI6 Lagos graduates 😁 Thanks for your grit. We hope you have equipped yourselves with enough tools to start kicking some asses in AI. Thanks for making each week worth looking forward to.
To our Partners ❤️
Thank you Innocent Amadi for your amazing work with FB Dev Circle Lagos, for building a community of amazing developers and helping other community like ourself grow though your support.
Thank you Vesper. Thank you Intel.
To all the amazing communities in Nigeria, thanks for all your hard-work 💛
Finally, a huge thanks goes to Nurture.AI for this amazing opportunity.
AI6 Lagos
Azeez Oluwafemi’s closing speech for AI6 Lagos first cohort (6th of Jan — 21st of April)
It’s easy to read an interesting biography of how some genius built an awesome technology or of how a very young and smart person built the first quantum teleportation system.
Few readers are aware of the influence of the “community factor” contributing to such success stories. If you’re very conversant with history, you would realize the impact of a lively intellectual community in breeding such kind of success story. Albert Einstein’s success story is a result of a long history of a massive community of intellectuals in Germany. It was this kind of community idea that gave birth to places like Institute of Advanced studies at Princeton, the construction of the first atomic bomb through the Manhattan project (A community of scientist and mathematicians) led by Robert Oppenheimer was also a result.
We want to build the future of our nation and our continent by extension through intellectual communities like AI Saturdays Lagos.
