How Omdena Helped Me Get Out of My Comfort Zone
From building an AI solution for Malaria prevention to managing a task group.
I have just finished my first project with Omdena and it has been a big adventure. The project that I have participated in was about “Preventing Malaria Infections Through Topography and Satellite Image Analysis,”.
Impact startup Zzapp Malaria hosted a project on the Omdena platform with the goal to find areas in which stagnant water bodies (malaria mosquito breeding sites) are likely to exist and mark those areas.
Find a technical overview of the article here.
Before Omdena— Deep Learning at Udacity
I had just completed a deep learning Nanodegree scholarship from Udacity, where I actually first heard about Omdena from one of the amazing people I met there. Needless to say, I was inspired and just couldn’t believe that such a place existed. To be very clear I had no prior knowledge of AI before the scholarship but I had a long history with coding and worked with several programming languages, and it was a great experience by itself.
It changed my way of thinking dramatically and introduced me to a world of people who have the same passion, and whom I’m still regularly in touch with, but when it was over, I felt that empty old familiar feeling, again.
I didn’t want to go back on working solely, because that was my way at the time and it had led me nowhere, I knew that for a fact. I remember how we pushed and motivated each other during the time of the challenge that preceded the scholarship and then the scholarship itself that spanned over a period of 9 months. I can say that I would have not done it or at least learned as much without the great community. The diversity, and the support to achieve one goal that keeps us all motivated in the craziest, busiest, and most hectic.
As a mother who is working from home and managing other responsibilities, that was a key aspect for me since I literally measure and evaluate each minute I spent away from my family and work, as the case with all mothers out there.
Applying for Omdena
It was the obvious choice, I needed to build up my skills if I ever wanted to have a career in this field, and what’s better than creating real projects to do so?!
After graduating from my deep learning course, I went to check out the Omdena website and I felt their message was directed at me.
They offered everything I missed from my last experience, from implementing AI to solve real-world problems to being part of a global community.
I was a bit anxious, even though I was reassured by an amazing friend of mine. Adding to that all of my personal insecurities took the chance to rise to the surface as usual and kept pushing me to go back to my old shell, but I have to say my desire to learn, leave a positive impact, make myself and my son proud were much stronger and I was prepared to make a complete fool of myself for the sake of it. Luckily though I didn’t need to :).
The application was a straight forward process. Once I filled a couple of the information in the form, where I was completely honest in describing my state of experience in AI and data science, I sent the application and I would say that I didn’t expect anything, but I would be lying. I knew deep down that I’ll be selected and I knew that I have something to offer to that project even if it is as little as it could be.
A few days after my application I received an email message. I was thrilled to know that I would be interviewed. The interview was casual and comparing to how nervous I was before it actually started; I accidentally hang up 😅, but I was more comfortable as soon as we started talking.
It was made clear that they are looking for collaborators with different skill levels, who are willing to commit and could work and communicate with a diverse community that includes already over 1,550 collaborators from more than 84 countries, and growing!
A couple of days later I got the happy news! I got selected with 49 other collaborators from 19 countries to work on the project for 8 weeks, which is usually the time period for developing most of the projects on Omdena. I was then invited to the slack channel 3 days before the challenge started.
Omdena´s growth path
One of the coolest things that I appreciated then, was that they assign you to an initial role based on the information you already included in your application. This is not to constraint you, you can totally ditch it if you find yourself in a different role. It might sound silly, but I was really excited when I received my role and felt that I finally belong somewhere. My role was and still is a Junior machine learning engineer, and I literally have put this image on my wall to see and get motivated on where I can go from now. Loved the tree metaphor!
Let´s get my hands dirty
Before the kick-off meeting, we didn’t know more about the project than the description and problem statement that was already shared on the website so you can imagine the levels of excitement and anticipation that fill the air. Obviously, there were lots of questions in my head.
As a piece of advice, try to be engaged from day one and prepare a list of questions.
Even if you think it is a stupid question. Many of them probably will be covered during the meeting but you shouldn’t hesitate to ask if some of them weren’t, I have learned that the outcome is always great and opens up interesting discussions you would not expect to take place, and you follow this rule on all of the meetings that will take place during the period of the challenge, there will be quite a lot of them.
Enjoying the self-driven environment
Knowing that no one will assign you to perform a certain task is kind of both, liberating and terrifying especially if it was your first time, but I would say there is more of an excitement to it than anything else because you are here to learn and no one will put constraints on what you want to do nor experience during this process. You can take on any problem and try to solve it. Here an important point comes to mind which is to try tackling things you have never worked with or have little experience.
Don’t get me wrong you can always play on your strength but don’t waste the opportunity of having so many experts and other people that could help you learn much faster by just keep doing what you good at and if you ever feel stuck go ahead and ask for help, trust me the outcomes were always satisfying and me gaining new valuable knowledge.
By the second week, I was approached by one of the collaborators who had worked on other projects with Omdena, who turned out to be one of the most inspiring people I met on this project. He noticed that I was really engaged from day one in slack and meetings and proposed that I should be the task manager for task one (data pre-processing); no one else volunteered at that point. I was hesitant at first.
Becoming a task manager
Before I was approached, I was planning to work more with the modeling team, but still, I already took the initiative along with others and started to work on getting more data for our project first, which involved learning about and working with Google Earth Engine platform among others tools, libraries, and techniques that I was introduced to, for the first time in this project (OSMnx, GeoPandas, Folium, MGRS, histogram manipulation, etc) which I might cover in my future posts. I knew that handling and pre-processing data was not where my strength lays and I was not comfortable with the idea of managing a team and preparing presentations, so I said ok! why not!.
Understand I wasn’t delusional here I didn’t paint a picture of me knowing it all or that it will be an easy task, I made it abundantly clear that I will need help and support along the way, and here lays the beauty of it all. That was the point all along to do new things.
From there my adventure has started where every day was a chance to grow and learn from all the amazing people that were around, and never let me down till the end.
We started with two main tasks that blew up to five. Nothing was set in stone and we were planning, experimenting, and expanding as we go. It is quite amazing looking back on how everything fit in place and went from creative chaos to beautiful order (it didn’t look so obvious being in the middle of it though), up into the final result.
One key thing was having people with professional expertise who provide constant help, guidance, and insights along the way that kept everything moving in the right direction.
And no, you don’t have to be an expert in coding, AI, or any technical subject to be a task manager. but it is essential to know all the responsibilities that you would carry out until the project completion:
- Creating and managing tasks. It was really great to work with and kept things in order, for all the tasks.
- Stay up to date with your team in weekly meetings besides day-to-day slack updates, also I used to check the GitHub repo regularly because things can go really out of proportion when new code is being pushed everyday.
- Communicate with other task managers; here we created a weekly call for the task managers to align our work and make sure we are working in the same direction.
- Preparing and present in weekly meetings attended by the beneficiaries of the project that would include listing all the achievements of your team, what you are planning to work on for next week, and what are the challenges you are facing if any.
So being a task manager would force you to be even more involved in the project and understand the whole process instead of focusing on the micro-tasks which might have its pros and cons especially if you have time constraints. I found myself spent most of my time trying to understand what others created, preparing for the meetings and communicating on what the next steps should be, and creating the presentations. Besides performing some of the tasks and contributing to the project itself.
The key thing I found is to communicate, communicate, and communicate some more. This is what keeps things in order and everyone on the same page on both requirements and tasks to perform. It is easy to work on something just to discover that someone else was working on already or turned out to be completely redundant, but even then, there is always something to gain, learn, or even can be applied for future projects.
Communicating and checking for updates on Slack and/or in meetings provide constant feedback and keeps you on the right track, this is one valuable lesson I have learned through this great experience.
Final Words — Perspective Matters
The reasons behind you doing the job you do matters.
If I was asked to work on a project to detect water bodies for any other purpose than trying to limit the spread of malaria infection, I would probably not been as motivated or as involved to get things done as I was during this project.
My goal was to gain experience, but it is a means to an end. I knew from experience that passion drives you to get that task done even when time is against you, it’s what makes you manage to be there for those meetings that have all these different and crazy time zone schedules, be really immersed in the whole process which leads you to grow and consequently becoming a better version of you with lots of experience.
Join the Omdena family
Please check out the list of the projects, it covers lots of interests and world issues and gets updated regularly.
Finally, I leave you with this bonus video that I found really inspiring and gives us a glips into how self organize learning should become the core of our education system.
