AI Corporations and Communities in Africa with Karim Beguir & Muthoni Wanyoike

Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Episode | Podcast

Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

<p>On the podcast today, we have two more fascinating interviews from <a href="https://twitter.com/nyghtowl">Melanie</a>’s time at Deep Learning Indaba! <a href="https://twitter.com/Neurotic">Mark</a> helps host this episode as we speak with <a href="https://twitter.com/@kbeguir">Karim Beguir</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/_tabbz">Muthoni Wanyoike</a> about their company, Instadeep, the wonderful Indaba conference, and the growing AI community in Africa.</p> <p>Instadeep helps large enterprises understand how AI can benefit them. Karim stresses that it is possible to build advanced AI and machine learning programs in Africa because of the growing community of passionate developers and mentors for the new generation. Muthoni tells us about Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, a community she is heavily involved with in Nairobi. The group runs workshops and classes for AI developers and encourages volunteers to participate by sharing their knowledge and skills.</p> <h5 id="karim-beguir">Karim Beguir</h5> <p><a href="https://twitter.com/@kbeguir">Karim Beguir</a> helps companies get a grip on the latest AI advancements and how to implement them. A graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at NYU’s Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. This led him to co-found InstaDeep, an AI startup that was nominated at the MWC17 for the Top 20 global startup list made by PCMAG. Karim uses TensorFlow to develop Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning products. Karim is also the founder of the TensorFlow Tunis Meetup. He regularly organises educational events and workshops to share his experience with the community. Karim is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wide audience.</p> <h5 id="muthoni-wanyoike">Muthoni Wanyoike</h5> <p><a href="https://twitter.com/_tabbz">Muthoni Wanyoike</a> is the team lead at Instadeep in Kenya. She is Passionate about bridging the skills gap in AI in Africa and does this by co-organizing the Nairobi Women in Machine Learning community. The community enables learning, mentorship, networking, and job opportunities for people interested in working in AI. She is experienced in research, data analytics, community and project management, and community growth hacking.</p> <h5 id="cool-things-of-the-week">Cool things of the week</h5> <ul> <li>Is there life on other planets? Google Cloud is working with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab to find out <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/is-there-life-on-other-planets-google-cloud-is-working-with-nasas-frontier-development-lab-to-find-out"> blog</a></li> <li>In this Codelab, you will learn about StarCraft II Learning Environment project and to train your first Deep Reinforcement Learning agent. You will also get familiar some of the concepts and frameworks to get to train a machine learning agent. <a href="https://soygema.github.io/starcraftII_machine_learning/#0">site</a></li> <li>A new course to teach people about fairness in ML <a href="https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/new-course-teach-people-about-fairness-machine-learning/?utm_source=googleAI&amp;utm_medium=tweet&amp;utm_campaign=mle-outreach&amp;utm_term=&amp;utm_content=mlcc-fairness-keyword-blog"> blog</a></li> <li>Serverless from the ground up: Building a simple microservice with Cloud Functions (Part 1) <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/serverless-from-the-ground-up-building-a-simple-microservice-with-cloud-functions-part-1"> blog</a></li> <li>Superposition Podcast from Deep Learning Indaba with Omoju Miller and Nando de Freitas <a href="https://twitter.com/superpositionZA/status/1050674252486139905">tweet</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ljOwsRAUy4&amp;t=1s">video</a></li> </ul> <h5 id="interview">Interview</h5> <ul> <li>Instadeep <a href="http://www.instadeep.com">site</a></li> <li>Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Nairobi-Women-in-Machine-Learning-Data-Science/"> site</a></li> <li>Neural Information Processing Systems <a href="https://nips.cc">site</a></li> <li>Google Launchpad Accelerator <a href="https://developers.google.com/programs/launchpad/accelerators/">site</a></li> <li>TensorFlow <a href="https://www.tensorflow.org">site</a></li> <li>Google Assistant <a href="https://assistant.google.com/#?modal_active=none">site</a></li> <li>Cloud AutoML <a href="https://cloud.google.com/automl/">site</a></li> <li>Hackathon Lagos <a href="https://www.hackathon.com/city/nigeria/lagos/2018">site</a></li> <li>Deep Learning Book <a href="http://www.deeplearningbook.org">book</a></li> <li>Ranked Reward: Enabling Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.01672.pdf">research paper</a></li> <li>Lessons learned on building a tech community <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/12-meetups-later-heres-10-invaluable-lessons-we-ve-learned-on-building-a-tech-community-a6de5aedba30"> blog</a></li> <li>Kenya Open Data Initiative <a href="http://icta.go.ke/kenya-open-data-initiative/">site</a></li> <li>R for Data Science GitHub <a href="https://github.com/hadley/r4ds">site</a> and <a href="http://r4ds.had.co.nz/">book</a></li> <li>TWIML Presents Deep Learning Indaba <a href="https://twimlai.com/indaba2018/">site</a></li> </ul> <h5 id="question-of-the-week">Question of the week</h5> <p>If I want to create a GKE cluster with a specific major kubernetes version (or even just the latest) using the command line tools, how do I do that?</p> <ul> <li>GCloud container clusters create <a href="https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/container/clusters/create"> site</a></li> <li>Specifying cluster version <a href="https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/versioning-and-upgrades#specifying_cluster_version"> site</a></li> </ul> <h5 id="where-can-you-find-us-next">Where can you find us next?</h5> <p>Our guests will be at <a href="http://www.deeplearningindaba.com/indaba-2019.html">Indaba 2019</a> in Kenya.</p> <p>Mark will be at <a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america-2018/"> KubeCon</a> in December.</p> <p>Melanie will be at <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/socml-2018/home">SOCML</a> in November.</p>