Beirut AI Community Recap: June 2019

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Beirut AI

4 min readJul 6, 2019

And we’re past the halfway mark of the year! We’re still learning, we’re still sharing and you better believe we’re not stopping any time soon! Here’s how Beirut AI’s June looked like.

But first…

We know it’s traditional to save the best news for last but who said we’re traditional? We are one month closer to the first AI Bootcamp in Lebanon!

Registration opened last month and seats filled up faster than we could have thought! Thank you for your enthusiasm and we absolutely cannot wait to meet you.

Beirut AI’s team has been hard at work trying to provide you with the best possible experience during the bootcamp. The bootcamp’s AI courses are entirely project-based with topics ranging from Introductions to Data Science and Machine Learning to specializations in Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Time-series Analysis, and Recommender Systems.

Attendees will put every day’s learning material into practice with a daily hands-on project that they can add to their portfolio. We want to ensure that we don’t just give you the theory that may enter one ear and leave the next. We want to make sure you’re right there on the ground debugging, analyzing and understanding every bit of theory with practice.

You can find out more about the schedule, location and pricing here.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming….

June Workshops

Unlucky number 13 represented quite a lucky day for Beirut AI this month! We had simultaneously running workshops in two different capitals.

Collaboration with Riyadh AI — June 13

For the first time, we collaborated with another City AI branch, Riyadh AI! Thanks to Alfaisal University for opening its doors to our team to provide our Introduction to AI workshop. It was a pleasure sharing our community with a new city and experiencing a new culture.

Introduction to Deep Learning with Tensorflow Workshop — June 13

The Beirut AI community never fails to amaze us as we had another full house in our Beirut based workshop. In this workshop, Obeida ElJundi defined deep learning and its basic unit, the elusive Neural Network. Neural Networks may be a mystery to many but not the attendees of this workshop! We demystified the black box of Neural Networks and broke them down into the smallest pieces we could. We explained how the neural network learns, what is the intuition behind it, and why you should be familiar with it now.

The code and presentation for the workshop are available here.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence at Codi — June 28

We love an engaged and inquisitive audience and that’s exactly what we got at Codi. Thank you, Codi, for welcoming Beirut AI and for giving us the floor to introduce our world of AI to you.

Other Resources

As always we want you to keep improving! Here are some resources we believe might help you keep your skills sharp.

Open Datasets for Natural Language Processing

We know that one of the hardest steps in AI is data collection. This article from the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) lists 20 open datasets you can use for Natural Language Processing.

https://opendatascience.com/20-open-datasets-for-natural-language-processing/

Competition

Driven Data’s Richter’s Predictor: Modeling Earthquake Damage

If you’re the more competitive type and you really like to flex, Driven Data has a competition with 6 months left on the clock that you can join. “Based on aspects of building location and construction, your goal is to predict the level of damage to buildings caused by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake in Nepal.”

https://www.drivendata.org/competitions/57/nepal-earthquake/