Announcing TensorFlow Nairobi
With TensorFlow growing its footprint in adoption, both in research and production, there is an even greater need to grow its community to enable code contributions, and also help answer questions and raise issues. In the 3+ years since launching TensorFlow, it has quickly grown to become the #1 machine learning platform. It might well be thought of as the most used framework powering ML systems out there. Being an open source library with capability to handle complex workflows, TensorFlow is being deployed across several platforms including mobile, cloud, embedded devices and web.
Behind these advancements is an incredible and diverse community, including researchers, developers, and companies dedicated to improving the framework to ensure faster and easier deployment of the machine learning models. In a spirited effort to join in the global community, we’re excited to announce TensorFlow Nairobi, a convergence of researchers, developers, data scientists & general enthusiasts in and around Nairobi who are interested in advancing their knowledge of TensorFlow, its use cases and applications. We shall join a long list of User Groups all over the world. In partnership with communities such as Nairobi AI, GDG Nairobi, and Nairobi WiMLDS, we are committed to making information, resources and expert guidance easily accessible and affordable to enthusiasts on every level, beginner, intermediate and expert.
Meetups & Workshops
We will be hosting several meetups over the coming months led by experts, each targeted at a core TensorFlow feature and functionality. To make it easy for you to plan your weekend we’re organizing sessions into tracks based on what you’re most interested in, everything from high-level APIs to tools such as TF Hub. We’ve structured the meetup topics to cover the most significant feature updates to the TensorFlow framework, and also included interesting sessions, fireside chats, hackathons and replay sessions. We’ll even be featuring community submitted panels. Yay!
Since TensorFlow was open-sourced in 2015, its adoption has significantly risen over the years, standing at 16m downloads on GitHub as at early 2019. Just recently, TensorFlow 2.0 was announced. With it comes updates like:
· Easy model building with Keras and eager execution.
· Robust model deployment in production on any platform.
· Powerful experimentation for research.
· Simplifying the API by cleaning up deprecated APIs and reducing duplication.
We’ll set the balls rolling hot on the heels of the recently concluded TensorFlow Dev Summit with our very own premiere meetup to be duly announced. Be sure to check out our Meetup page for full details of the event.
TensorFlow for Africa: Our Vision
One of the biggest goals of this community is to showcase success stories of projects built by Kenya’s AI and data science talent and powered by TensorFlow, and in equivalence, Africa’s adoption of TensorFlow in different projects. We aim to increase Africa’s visibility in ML adoption, and propel contribution to upcoming versions of TensorFlow by African researchers and developers.
Join The Community
To join our community, sign up on our Meetup page (https://meetup.com/TensorFlow-Nairobi) where we are going to be posting all of our events to ensure you never miss any of them.
Follow us on Twitter for instant updates to everything TensorFlow.
Speakers:
We are actively in search of speakers interested in conducting technical talks on TensorFlow or any related technology, such as Keras, dl4j, PyTorch, Spark, scikit-learn to name a few. Are you interested in doing a lightning talk/project showcase? Send your talk proposal here: http://bit.ly/tfug-speaker
Inquiries & Suggestions
In case of any questions, suggestions or opinions, feel free to reach out to Muthoni Wanyoike or Chris Barsolai. Also, you can share your thoughts on the comments section on our Meetup page or tweet us.
For partnerships, kindly email info@nairobi.ai
Extremely grateful to Aniedi Udo-Obong and Olaiwola Bolaji for helping set up this community.
If you still haven’t joined the community, what are you waiting for? It won’t be the same without you. We’ll be seeing you at TF Nairobi!
