AI Saturdays — Empowering Anyone to be Kickass in AI
Totally free for anyone to attend, aimed at getting you to kickass in AI! 🚀
TL;DR AI Research moving too fast, industry lacks skilled AI engineers. AI Saturdays is here to bridge that gap — empowering anyone & everyone to learn AI.
At this very moment, there’s no doubting that Artificial Intelligence is taking the world by storm. A 2017 report from McKinsey Global Institute on AI states that a total of $39 billion was invested into the industry in 2016, with major tech companies like Google and Amazon spearheading research and development.
Early adopters of AI technologies are already creating competitive advantages, and the gap with the laggards looks set to grow.
While many are still skeptical of it’s practical uses, it’s clear that early adopters are already reaping large benefits. VC’s are already looking for the next big AI startup to back — check out this list of 100 AI startups and their funding so far.
Making an Impact
Let’s take a step back and look at things at the other end of the spectrum. With the innovation of GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), advances with virtual agents (think self-driving cars) and deep learning, funny that we’ve yet to see more of an impact made in our everyday lives.
“We have enough papers. Stop publishing, and start transforming people’s lives with technology!” — Andrew Ng, Coursera & Deeplearning.ai Founder at the AI Frontiers Conference
Looking at this objectively, the state of the AI research scene moves way too quickly. The latest papers are building off of works of papers a mere month ago. Techniques and best practices become obsolete before you can finish saying: “I had three 🍕s for lunch with pineapples.”
Speaking to plenty of enthusiastic learners, I’ve found that many people are intimidated by the sheer complexity of AI research papers. Those who do read them often find that they’d have to go through the references of references to find out what something means.
Despite this difficulty, there is still a large amount of interest in this field, computer science degrees now becoming a valuable assets to students. The fact that there is a shortage of talent and cost of acquiring it are underlined by a report that US companies are seeking to fill 10,000 AI-related jobs and have budgeted more than $650 million for salaries.
Announcing AI Saturdays
AI Saturdays (affectionately known as AI6) is a community-driven, non-profit and global movement across the globe to make Artificial Intelligence education at the quality and rigor of the world’s best universities accessible to anyone for free.
Our vision for AI6 is for it to be an unstoppable medium, enabling anyone and everyone to become kickass in AI.
AI6 was launched discretely 2 months ago, under Nurture.AI. To date, we have more than 5000 participants globally and are in multiple cities around the world like Kathmandu, Lagos, Kharagpur, Seattle, Kuala Lumpur, Warsaw just to name a few. Our participants range from people who have mastered deep learning through online courses and lecture videos, Kaggle masters, Fast.ai Fellows and people with Masters and PhDs from top universities like Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, to complete beginners in AI — there’s something for everyone.
AI6 is a free-to-attend, structured study groups going through materials used in universities like Stanford, Berkeley, and UCL, covering cutting-edge techniques in AI and deep learning that are available online. These study groups are held every Saturday, with structured materials and sessions targeted for people at skill all levels.
A Global Classroom
Despite the number of members we have up to this point, many cities do not have anyone with actual experience in AI. Addressing this, we figured that having a single syllabus for every city allows people to come together to solve problems and learn together on a global scale.
Questions and problems get posted on the AI6 forums, where everyone involved comes together to solve them. It’s like having a single massive classroom. 🌎👩 👨 👳 👲 👸 🌍
Get your learning on!
Being a part of AI6 means You’ll be part of a global community effort learning AI together. Together, we’ll push each other onwards and keep each other accountable for our learning experiences. All while making steady progress towards getting you kickass at AI!
Interested in joining AI Saturdays? Get more details here.
Find this useful? Feel free to smash that clap and check out my other works. 😄
James Lee is an AI Research Fellow at Nurture.AI. A recent graduate from Monash University in Computer Science, he writes about on Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. Follow him on Twitter @jamsawamsa.
