The Inception of deepNeuron
While traveling Europe in the first half of 2018, I had the idea of a student-led AI engineering team. Similar to that of a university version of openAI and DeepMind, where we put together the brightest minds in the student community to solve common societal problems using AI and deep learning. At the time I thought it was just an “idea”, nothing would materialize out of it, so I let it go.
When I got back to Melbourne in July of 2018, through a chance encounter met some like minded people that also believed in the power of AI, and with that, we started deepNeuron together.
We’re a bunch of students who are amateur AI practitioners, but the problems we’re looking to address with AI are anything but. We’re starting off in the medical field, harnessing the power of deep learning to target pain points of the medical profession and researchers. However, we won’t just be limited to that. As the team progresses, we’re looking to add arms to our venture that combines AI with Robotics, AI with Cybersecurity, Reinforcement Learning, NLP and much more. Slowly transitioning from a Software based team to a TRUE student team with students of all faculties represented. An analogy of this would be a multi-year running in perpetuity hackathon, where students of all faculties think of issues they’re passionate about, then work together to address it with AI.
I’m not going to lie, initially I had my doubts on whether a such student team would ever fly with the university faculty. However, given the enormous interest and support of the Monash IT Faculty, who’ve supported us with mentorship and getting us jump started, And the fact that we got 91 and counting applications to our very first recruitment with nothing but just email marketing (what millennial still checks their email nowadays, seriously), to say we’ve peaked the interest of the student community here at Monash University, would be a gross understatement.
With the generous support of the Monash IT Faculty, and the continuing interest of students looking to join the project, we’ve recruited a batch of talented AI student engineers, and over the December holidays, will look to start our first project, to be announced soon… The point is, this is the first of many articles from deepNeuron, follow our journey on Facebook and Medium on how we plan to solve the world’s problems, one AI at a time.
