Beirut AI Community Recap: January 2020

Alaa El Hariri
Beirut AI
Published in
3 min readFeb 4, 2020

Well, 2020 sure started off with a bang! Take that as you will… But here at Beirut AI we made the best of the positive new year energy with a second edition of our bootcamp and a collaboration with AWS Beirut UG!

The Beirut AI Bootcamp — January 2020

We want to start off this bootcamp highlight with a heart-felt thank you to everyone who was committed to attending every single day. We know that the situation in Lebanon at the moment is not ideal. The streets were on fire, yet so many participants and the members of our team were determined to make every single day of the bootcamp count, whether in person or remotely. You made this a more remarkable experience than we could have asked for.

The bootcamp journey began with an introduction to Data Science which allowed the participants to test the waters before the instructors helped them dive deeper into more specialized topics. During the next four days, the participants went through both the theoretical and practical aspects of Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Time Series Analysis. Every day, the participants left with a hands-on project that showcased the skills they acquired from that day. For a more detailed account of the content of the bootcamp check out our August 2019 Recap.

This six-day journey ended with a Hackathon to challenge the participants to creatively use what they learned during the bootcamp. The participants ideated, formed teams and created AI solutions for real-life problems. As with the previous bootcamp, we were surprised and proud at just how much talent our community has and we know you will never cease to amaze us!

Highlights from the bootcamp

This time around we saw just how diverse our community actually is. We always knew that AI was for everyone, and it is one of our goals to give as many people access to the right resources. We were so happy to see such a wide range of ages attending, from the undergraduate to the seasoned professional, all looking to gain more knowledge and arm themselves with better skills. We were also extremely happy to have more female presence at the bootcamp this time and hope to see even more representation in the future.

Finally, we would like to thank our sponsors, partners, judges and the entire team of Beirut AI from the organizers, instructors, and volunteers! Thank you to Microsoft for being our education partner for this bootcamp to provide the participants with certificates of completion. We also want to thank the Asher Center For Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK) for providing us the venue for the bootcamp. And finally our sponsor Zaka!

AWS Beirut UG Meetup: SageMaker + TensorFlow Workshop

This month we also collaborated with AWS Beirut UG to provide a hands on workshop with Amazon SageMaker. Amazon SageMaker allows data scientists and developers to quickly and easily build and train machine learning models and deploy them on the cloud. Tensorflow, on the other hand makes it easy for developers to create machine learning models . Julien Simon introduced Amazon SageMaker and Beirut AI’s Christophe Zoghbi guided the attendees on how to create and deploy a Tensorflow model on Amazon SageMaker.

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Alaa El Hariri
Beirut AI

Human. Developer @Hedgeguard . Co-organiser @GDGLebanon . Blog Writer @BeirutAI. Imposter Introvert. I’ll forever be a work in progress 🦋. Opinions are my own.