We are going global with City AI

This article was first published on Deep Learning Journal

Recently we initiated Artificial Intelligence for Development or AID in short, to empower AI movement in Nepal. The idea is to develop AI talent in Nepal and connect them with domain experts from diverse fields such as health, education, agriculture, finance, transportation etc and create an environment to develop AI solutions to existing community problems in such fields.

This approach will develop AI ecosystem in Nepal and will address following issues:

1. It will allow new AI learners to learn from practical problems in local community.
2. AI developers will exercise their skills to develop solutions that are directly beneficial to the community,
3. which in turn will increase their expertise and will help them in their career.
4. Domain experts will get a fresh approach to solve existing problems using latest technology.
5. Solving community problems using cutting edge technology like AI will progress the society further.

Since our initiation, we have been receiving love and support from both inside and outside of the country. We have already reached hundreds of enthusiast members from the day of the initiation who support our movement and believe in our mission.

To truly address community issues and solve them using Artificial Intelligence we would require support from local as well as global experts in both AI and respective domain we are dealing with. To facilitate this and help us connect with outer world, we have teamed up with City AI.

City AI is a global non profit organization of AI practitioner across 40+ cities, and 6 continents world wide with tens of thousands of community members.

With the support from City AI, our cause and movement will have a global voice and allows us to develop further by learning from similar organizations like ours from around the world. Our ideas, works and contributions will be shared to the whole world where not only local Nepalese community but similar communities like ours from different countries will also be benefited from our efforts.

By establishing Kathmandu AI as the Nepalese chapter of City AI, our learners and developers will have following benefits:

1. AI Developers will receive global support to enhance their skills, this has potential leading to connecting with international companies and organizations for employment.
2. Problems can be analyzed and developed more efficiently by learning from what others have already tried and developed in other countries.
3. Connection with global community of change makers.
4. International Recognition.

What’s next?

Our next step is to work on the objectives and the mission we have developed. To properly develop a solution, first we require to develop a process. For this we are conducting series of dialogue and discussions with AI beginners, intermediate AI developers and Domain Experts. These discussions will be take the form of series of events, which are weekly or bi-weekly in nature and will totally focus on exchanging ideas and coming up with solutions. These discussion events will not be a regular speaker-audience type of event and will require every participants to engage and collaborate irrespective of their domain expertise.

For new and aspiring AI learners, who are just getting started in this field of AI, we will have AI meet Beginners discussion event, where we will share our story, share resources, platform and learning techniques to learn properly in this field. The resources will be courses we have developed, platforms we can provide, expert mentoring and project ideas to implement their skills.

Similarly for AI developers who are intermediate in terms of skills, we will host another weekly or bi-weekly discussion event, where we collaborate with them closely to develop community solutions. These discussions will also have presence of domain experts from diverse fields. Working closely with AI developers and domain experts will help to bring efficient community solutions rapidly.

With this approach we will be developing interactive events and discussion forums to progress our development to create solutions for our community.

To get to know about all the new events and our progresses, please join our facebook community called Developer Sessions. This group will act as our official community for AID and with this you can also directly connect with us the team members directly.

With love and support from all of you and this global support from City AI. We could not be more excited and hopeful about our mission to create AI solution to transform Nepal for greater good.