Introducing AI Saturdays Abeokuta: Revolutionizing the Rock City
In the words of Dave Waters, “Computers are now able to see, hear and learn, WELCOME TO THE FUTURE!”
WEEK 1
Saturday the 8th of September saw the launch of AI Saturdays Abeokuta, with the aim of achieving the purpose for which AI Saturdays was created. AI Saturdays (aka AI6) is a global community driven movement catalyzed by Nurture.ai (an International Artificial Intelligence educational group in Singapore). It is a global movement to make AI education accessible to everyone from the world’s best universities; from Stanford to Berkeley, UCL, MIT among others.
The goal of the Abeokuta chapter is to bring like-minded people ranging from beginners to professionals, to share knowledge, build synergy and create great AI models that would help solve some of the challenging problems in our society.
The first meet-up had in attendance about 30 enthusiastic young people ready to learn. It was a great motivation for me as there were a lot of positive feedback from the participants.
The session started with an introductory video to Artificial Intelligence. The video showed varieties of technologists (the computer vision lead, engineer, UI/UX designer, developer etc) collaborate together to build an artificial intelligence supported robot — Cosmo. It also described the self-driving car principle, and other aspects of machine learning like the hand eye coordination, facial recognition and so on.
Then came networking 101, where we all got to know each other. Everyone present was jovial, cheerful, accommodating and most importantly happy to be in such a vibrant gathering, even though most of the participants were beginners.
We then went on to explain to ourselves the prospects we had for AI Saturdays for our chapter which are:
1. VISION: Our vision is for AI6 to be a global-scale and community-driven medium, enabling anyone and everyone to become kick-ass in AI. :)
2. MISSION: “No thief, however skillful can Rob one of knowledge, and that’s why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire”, says L. Frank Baum.
3. DURATION: This cycle of AI Saturdays is to begin from 1st of August, 2018 to 28th of February, 2019.
Lesson sessions would end on the 31st of January before which we are supposed to have completed projects to be eligible for the Certificate of participation and Special recognition.
However, the chapter started its cycle on the 8th of September, 2018 and is to end on the 28th of February, 2019.
4. SPECIAL RECOGNITION: Participants who take an extra mile to learn AI get a special recognition by doing one of the following ;
- Being an AI fellow. Achieved by hosting virtual mentoring/studying groups sessions with other AI members.
- Write at least 3 articles on AI Research papers.
- Submit at least 1 code implementation on nurture.ai .
5. TOP ACHIEVER: A top achiever should have completed one capstone project accompanied by a blog post on AI6 medium publication, OR
- Completed at least 5 assignments hosted on the lesson plan.
6. BENEFITS: All participants who get a certificate of achievement get automatically admitted into the exclusive Saturday alumni network where they get:
- Exclusive sessions with expert mentors.
- Access to Alumni Competitions for tickets to global AI conferences and GPU compute credits.
NOW, WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
This document contains a simplified and detailed description of AI, as discussed at the meet-up: https://web.facebook.com/groups/1826649300776689/permalink/1845691248872494/
After discussing what AI is all about, we dived into the Linear Algebra using the Khan Academy course which covers Vectors and Spaces, Matrices, and Coordinate Systems. As detailed as they were, they are very explanatory, thanks to the already structured syllabus on Machine Learning being followed.
Link to the course: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra
On to the next one; installation of the Python environment (ANACONDA) to be used for the course was done by everyone present.
The session which started at 10AM that morning ended by 2PM and everyone went home with the first assignment. Everyone was to watch some linear Algebra Videos on Khan Academy and some Introduction to Python videos to complete against the next meet-up.
Join us every Saturday at HIC mikroLAB, Asero Abeokuta.
See you at our next meet-up ;)
