A Plot Twist: Here’s how we made friends with 2020!
Looking back onto the past year, perhaps the main thing we did that we owe our growth to is accepting 2020 with all its ups and (plenty) downs. Instead of pushing against the surprises thrown our way, we did our best to take them with an open heart and adapt quickly.
A year ago today, we were focusing on our Zaka AI Bootcamp MENA Tour! We wanted to travel all around MENA and share our AI bootcamp program with as many people as possible. We got to visit Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Amman, Jordan before airports became the new history museums. We were lucky though, we won’t deny it. As a small company, it was very easy to shift our strategy 180 degrees. We took all our programs online, and we found that Zaka’s fully remote work environment came to play in our favor!
Seizing Opportunities
Our first amazing launch this year was with our internship program. We seized our remote culture to help provide easy access to internship opportunities for students who were struggling with completing university training requirements. Our six remote internship positions launched in early April.
We had incredible projects come our way where we worked on exciting and challenging problems. Our consultancy team was able to tackle many challenges by building AI solutions to solve problems like plant segmentation and clothes detection! We have so much more to share with you as we are building a wide range of AI-powered video analytics applications.
Other than that, we tried a new approach to our education product development! We shifted our focus to adopting a human-centered design strategy for our educational programs and offerings. We want to ensure that our community is getting the best value on education and the education they need but also want. In a way, we are designing our programs alongside our customers!
Growing with Others
One of our favorite elements from this year was all the amazing communities we got to meet and work with. After we got our strategy adjusted and reached the end of the first quarter, we started to connect with communities and organizations of similar values to ours in hopes that we can build bigger dreams together.
“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller
We are proud to be able to have had the privilege of partnering with these amazing organizations: City AI, Microsoft, Phi Science Institute, Wonderland AI, Alfaisal University, Prince Sultan University, Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, and more.
City AI is a global Artificial Intelligence community with branches in over 80+ cities! As part of Zaka’s community-driven culture, we are honored to have the opportunity to support City AI in pushing its mission in the MENA region and on a global scale. As part of this effort, we were able to open new City AI branches in the MENA — Amman AI & Tunis AI — and build a partnership with IEEE Standards Association.
We had the privilege of becoming Global Training Partners at Microsoft, where we also got the amazing opportunity to partner and bring to life a large-scale educational program for university students all across MENA. We’ll tell you all about it in the next section.
In an effort to provide opportunities for MENA, we also initiated our Zaka Expert Network (ZEN) where we bring together AI professionals and experts to provide hands-on education from regional talent. We are always looking for individuals who are eager to share their knowledge with others. If this interests you, please reach out and let us know.
Community is one of our highest virtues, and we always seek to wholeheartedly act upon these virtues. We were so proud of our sister NGO’s incredible accomplishments this year, Beirut AI, especially with the unique challenges facing Lebanon. We were also very excited to share our knowledge in many occasions where our team members participated in summits, podcasts, invited talks, and more (links can be found at the end of the blog).
Exciting Launches
The last quarter of 2020 was FIRE! We had two, long-awaited projects come to life. In October, we launched an all-new look for Zaka, where we revamped our branding and reinvented our website entirely. We worked so hard to portray Zaka’s spirit, culture, and energy in its new branding and were mindful of providing our customers with the best experience when looking for their best AI fit with Zaka.
In December, we ended the year with our most exciting educational program so far — AI Ready Academy! This program will be running throughout the academic year 2020–2021 and will host 400 students from more than 6 countries all across MENA. We are currently running the first offering and will soon launch the second offering for February 2021, stay tuned!!
Ending it Strong!
Last but not least, our pride and joy for this year was being able to grow our Zaka team and foster amazing talent and humans within our culture. We are extremely proud of our Z-team: Rawane Madi, Tony Soulage, Joseph Assaker, Mohammad Haj Hussein, and Kamal Raydan.
“Teamwork makes the dream work” — John C. Maxwell
That’s a wrap 2020! We are proud to have been able to:
- Grow our community to 1000+ members
- Educate 700+ people
- Enter 6+ countries
- Offer 9+ programs
- Collaborate with 7+ partners
We are welcoming 2021 with open arms and LOTS of excitement! Can you guess what’s our next big thing for 2021?!
Sponsored/Partner Events:
- Beirut AI Bootcamp — January 2020
- Beirut AI Bootcamp — August 2020
- Hack for Hope — September 2020
- 1st International Symposium on Applied Linguistic Research (ALLAB’20) — November 2020
- Wonderland AI Summit — November 2020
- Beirut AI Weekend — November 2020
Invited Talks:
- World AI Panel in Wonderland AI Summit
- Discussion Panel at Global virtual ICT4D conference
- Beirut AI Weekend, Unleash Your AI Magic
- Intro to Computer Vision Workshop in Data Science Conference Europe 2020 Vision
Podcasts:
- AI in Lebanon with A Better Beirut
- Artificial Intelligence with Coder Voice
- Building AI for Everyone with Issam Hijazi: Youtube — LinkedIn
Don’t forget to support with a clap!
You can join our efforts at Zaka and help democratize AI in your city! Reach out and let us know.
To discover Zaka, visit www.zaka.ai
Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on our social media accounts to stay up to date with our news and activities:
