Beirut AI Community Recap: October 2019
In light of recent events in Lebanon, and in solidarity with the protests and revolution, Beirut AI had postponed all activities that were scheduled after October 17th. We stand with our Lebanese family as we fight for our basic rights as human beings as well as our right for a better future for ourselves and future generations.
Beirut AI will continue its dedication to growing and supporting the Lebanese community. We will keep you posted through our newsletter and social media about any and all upcoming events and important dates.
Before the protests in Lebanon began the Beirut AI team was still hard at work and below is a summary of the first couple of weeks of our October.
Fifth Quarterly Meetup — October 17th
Beirut AI’s goal with the quarterly meetups is to put machine learning industry professionals and enthusiasts under one roof where they can discuss machine learning applications, gain exposure and create a network. Our fifth quarterly meetup speakers were Prof. Mazen Saghir, Dr. Edgard Chammas and Najib Sabbagh.
Prof. Saghir shared insights from his team’s win at the Google AI Impact Challenge, where the winning team was selected from an initial pool of 2600 applications! Prof Saghir emphasized the importance of open-sourcing and collaboration in AI. Dr. Chammas followed by challenging our audience with a handwriting recognition research problem and shared his findings of the problem from his award-winning Ph.D. It was extremely enlightening! Finally, Mr. Sabbagh, CEO of Mirrorr.com, shed light on the underlying technologies that run Mirrorr’s unique and innovative AI-powered marketing platform and emphasized the impact the company has had before even officially launching their platform! It was with great pride that we heard of our Lebanese young entrepreneurs’ success stories!
We would like to thank Prof. Saghir, Dr. Chammas, and Mr. Sabbagh for the time and content they provided us in our meetup. It was a great pleasure seeing our guests and speakers mingle, learn, and build a community!
Beirut AI at Google Devfest 2019 in Beirut — October 12th
We visited Google Devfest this year! Our very own Reem Mahmoud who gave the audience a glimpse into the challenges that head our way with the adoption of AI, how Lebanon is home to amazingly talented people working in the field, and how Beirut AI’s mission of tackling AI education is one of the main pillars that will help in mitigating challenges that arise.
We thank GDG Coast Lebanon for having us. It was amazing to see all the enthusiasm from the Lebanese community to collaborate and prosper together!
Other Resources
Articles
Beirut AI — Basics of an AI Project
Very often in these recaps we provide a high-level description of the process of creating an AI project but we seldom delve into the details. This month we provided a detailed article on the many steps one must go through to create an AI project you can check it out here.
A Light-Hearted Dance-Related AI
We hope that this light-hearted yet powerful DeepFakes AI will both put a smile on your face and inspire you in these stressful times. A method by ShanghaiTech University and Tencent AI that uses Liquid Warping GANs can make anyone an amazing dancer check out the full article here.
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For more information visit city.ai/cities/beirut.
Article reviewed by Reem Mahmoud.
