An AI Project for Good, Overcoming Procrastination, And Learning Faster
While using machine learning to assess the impact of desert locust in Kenya.
My journey with AI started with the ML A-Z course and I wondered how these models can impact business and life. I started with researching more and more and doing projects as I have always believed in learning by doing. Then I got into deep learning starting with Udacity’s Facebook scholarship and completing the Deep Learning Nanodegree.
As I am a data scientist by profession I have worked on client projects and took part in many competitions, but yes I face the problem of procrastinating personal projects after a time and I always wanted to make something that had a social impact rather than only financial gains.
I have a believe that Teamwork or community projects are something that can help me to overcome the habit of procrastinating. My belief was strong because I had earlier seen the power of community work in Udacity scholarships, but finding a project in the community was hard for me. But once I saw a LinkedIn post of Omdena shared by one of my connections I browsed the website and found quite an interesting project and applied for it. Next, I had an interview, and finally got selected!
Community+social projects. Yes, that´s what I was searching for, finally, I got it.
I was selected for “Impact assessment of Desert Locust in Kenya”.I was going to collaborate with 50 people from more than 20 countries.
Overcoming challenges
But wait another challenge was yet to come, I had never worked on satellite images or any image project. I was damn nervous on the initial days. How can I manage my project deliverables and also learn a totally new domain and technique? I was skeptical about how I can manage these challenges.
There comes the power of community I started interacting with my fellow teammates on slack, believe me, I got inspiration and support from people whom I have never meet and are from totally different regions. That's the power of community when people from the different regions can support each other to achieve a mutual purpose i.e. to build an AI solution to impact the lives and help them to overcome distress.
My Learning Journey
I started with breaking down the problem statement and also my learning path. I started with how to gather data from satellites.
I learned how we can gather images from the google earth engine and how we can do analysis on the collected images and also how can we find out how weather or other factors influencing the changes in that region from time to time.
The next step after collecting and analyzing was building models, I had got a chance to work on various supervised and unsupervised techniques. The main takeaway from this step was an improvement in my experimentation attitude, I learned how good things come out when one is free to ideate and experiment with ideas.
The final step was to assess how the locust has impacted an area. We tried different metrics and techniques to find the best method to measure the impact.
The most amazing thing here I experienced was how people from different time zones can come together and work for a purpose and also support each other and guide someone like me, and prove once again that knowledge and humanity is the common language and zone.
My takeaways from this project in three words will be Ideate, Experiment, and Implement. Now after this project I really have started to think for ideas and experimenting with new techniques which I feel is the essence of one's career.
Join the Omdena family
Please check out the list of projects. There are lots of interesting social projects on world issues and there is a new project starting every week.
