London.AI — Building a community of AI practitioners
Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014 sent artificial intelligence (AI) to the top of the technology community’s agenda here in London. Since then, acquisitions like SwiftKey by Microsoft Research, Prediction.IO by Salesforce and Magic Pony Technology by Twitter proved that AI is a trend with serious momentum and not merely a transient one. The new world is one where products with loyal customers and plentiful features won’t guarantee a company’s longevity. AI, much like cloud computing and mobile, is one of the few technologies that delivers accelerating returns when deployed at scale. With intelligence being the next frontier in technology, we are noting computer science university programs having oversubscribed AI-related courses, accelerator demo days packed with brilliant PhDs taking product X and adding AI and attendance at AI conferences (whether business, research or developer focused) going through the roof.
Amidst all the hype, it became hard to keep up with trends and filter out some of the noise. While the deeply technical community have their meetups in London and the startup crowd has roundtables, pitching events and panels, we took the view that a new forum was required to nurture the applied AI movement. To that end, we set up London.ai. The fate of gatherings like this one are predicated on the quality of their content and community — we take both incredibly seriously. With our sixth event coming up in four weeks (check it out here), we wanted to take the opportunity to publish the core tenets with which we operate London.ai:
· Format: We schedule 3–4 speakers to present for 15 minutes each on the problem they’re solving, their commercial and technical constraints, how AI enables a better/faster/cheaper solution, or an entirely new one altogether, and what results they have achieved so far. We then invite the audience to participate in 10 minutes of Q&A right after.
· No Terminator questions: “Robo-apocalypse” questions have their place and we do believe that research and policy work investigating the ethical frameworks for applied AI are important (we even invited the brilliant team at the FHI to properly cover this). However, we prefer to focus on the pragmatic, real-world applications of AI in order to appraise the significant value it can deliver to our lives today.
· Relevant speakers: In line with being product-centric, we have focused on speakers who are either founders or engineering leaders of companies developing or leveraging machine learning, as well as applied academic researchers working on the core technologies that will soon power market solutions.
· Audience mix: We strive to have the right balance of startups, academics, corporates and investors. We keep the audience small (around 100 guests) which lets us know who is in the room and make the most out of their time by suggesting connections, highlighting who is hiring and introducing new faces.
· Supporting the community: In line with our mission to support the applied AI community, we ask everyone to contribute £5 for attendance. All proceeds go to CodeClub, a group that organizes after-school coding programs. The attendee contribution has also led to a reduction in non-attendance by 50% and ensures a higher level of commitment.
We’ve been fortunate enough to run this five times, have learned a lot from our 17 incredible speakers, and got to know London’s machine learning (ML) community a lot better. While the current European AI wave might have ignited in London, we are excited to support the emergence of other applied AI meetups in cities across Europe, though we might save this for a separate post. We hope to see many of you at our sixth event on November 24th, featuring Aire, Gluru, and Unbabel (sign up here)!
See you at the next meetup,
