Learning and my AI journey

1. Learning accrues: When I started university in Singapore 14 years ago, I was the only Indian in a batch of 100 to take up a Mandarin course in the first semester. I didn’t need to be fluent in the language to reap the benefits. I’ve made more friends and participated in university projects in mainland China and Taiwan. Now, I find myself working in China and using Mandarin to converse in a business setting (albeit at a survival level).
2. I believe that learning AI will open doors for me similar to the experience above. More doors in fact, related and unrelated.
3. First AI steps: My AI journey started as part of a business analytics consulting project. The problem involved segmenting customer behavior by analyzing the operational usage of equipment. I ended up using k-means and hierarchical clustering after figuring out (from general online learning. See Pic 1 below) that these techniques were relevant to the problem. I used an Excel plug-in to implement this. No fancy Python.
   The truth is, I only figured out after a year that these unsupervised learning techniques were part of a domain called machine learning.
   I was just trying to solve a problem and not specifically learn ML then.

Pic 1: Unsupervised Learning

4. Deliberate learning: Since last year, I’ve tried to accelerate my ML learning via online courses, like Andrew Ng’s famous Machine Learning course and I have recently completed Kirill Eremenko/Hadelin Ponteves A-Z ML course in Python. Now, it’s time to dive into Deep Learning with Fast.ai.

5. Playing the whole game: What I like about Fast.ai is that you are exposed to the practical aspects of Deep Learning from the beginning instead of going through detailed theory. Read more about it here:
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/09/01/education-bat-seven-principles-educators.
I used this mindset to train around 7 people at work in Python, by immersing them in a business problem that one person was facing.

What I’m doing differently now is that I am learning along with other people (based in different cities in China like Shanghai, Beijing) as part of the unpackAI course https://medium.com/unpackai. What’s surprising is that people from a variety of backgrounds are participating. The author of fast.ai himself did not have a technical major.

I believe fast.ai is a step shift in my trajectory. After this there is less benefit from taking more courses. I need to just do practical projects.

6. What will come out of this ? : What has happened is that I’ve become more involved in Digitalization overall, from learning about related technologies to the people management side of things. This looks to be like a viable future career path, and I enjoy it. It’s not only about AI.

Similar to learning Mandarin, I just want to keep getting better.
The opportunities will follow.

Cheers
Sahil
P.S: First medium post FTW!