Hello! Intros thread!

Hi,

I am Pradeep from Chicago. I am a mechanical engineer who has professional experience doing fluid dynamics and physics simulations of engineering components and systems. I am working on a couple of courses on Coursera(Neural Networks for Machine Learning and Probabalistic graphical models) alongside this course.
I am in between lesson 2 and 3 on the MOOC. I really the like the course because it teaches me how to apply these abstract concepts on real world datasets.
Thank you for the indispensable forums. I am looking forward to collaborating and contributing to ongoing discussions.

Hi all, Geoff from Durham, NC, USA - the ā€œStartup Capital of the Southā€. Found out about this course via a local meetup to work through it.

I work in DevOps right now. Based on the first video, this course looks to be more my style than some of the more math heavy MOOCs on the topic.

BTW, instructions on joining slack channel could be more clear / explicit. Slack is featured prominently on the front page of the course, but the linked page tells students nothing about the (non-trivial) procedure for getting an invite to the slack channel.

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Hi Everyone,
Christina from northwest New Jersey. I am currently a program and project management consultant for a very large telecom company in their technology development group. But I really miss this stuff, and want to get back into it!

My first masters degree was in Systems and Control Engineering back in 1990/91, with a focus on neural nets, fuzzy control systems and fuzzy classifiers. I last worked on neural nets for turbine engine fault detection in the aerospace industry in the early 90ā€™s. Back then we did everything manually in C, on computers that were as slow as molasses! For some of the reasons that Jeremy highlighted in his lesson 0, things just never really took off like they are now. Technology kind of went into an ā€œAI desertā€. My career moved on.

But I really love this stuff, and now that deep learning has evolved to be more practical with fast GPUs, nice libraries, and some new algorithms, I want to come up to speed with the modern technology and get back into it again!

Thanks Jeremy and Rachel for generously putting your heart and soul into this MOOC to help us do just that! :slight_smile:

Christina

Hello Rachel and all,

  • I took the Stanford ML Ng class, and the Caltech ML class. I went to UCLA and studied music, film, and television. Have studied iOS swift programming. Was the head of R & D at a company. I was raised and still live in California not so far from Silicon Beach.
  • I am interested in DL , because I think I think the world needs some help with a few things, and this is a new medium to be creative, and help out where I can.
  • I hope this class is a challenge that goes beyond the theory, while meeting other smart people, who have fun with this stuff.
  • Outside of this I am a singer, tenor, opera, here is some audio data to back up my claims.
    https://soundcloud.com/blake-fullmer/nessun-dorma-blake-fullmer
    -I also like to play tennis occasionally, I had a friend in India who said it did good things for his coding and I took his word for it. Itā€™s not bad for a 20 min game, outside

Looking forward to this with you all.
Cheers,
Blake

Hi everyone,

I studied psychology at college but ended up developing more of an interest in mathematics. I am currently trying hard to improve my math skills so that I can some day pursue an advanced degree in the subject. This year I plan to self-study some linear algebra, abstract algebra, and real analysis.

On the machine learning side of things, Iā€™d mainly like to begin participating on Kaggle.

Hello everyone,

Iā€™ve recently taken an interest in DL and ML more broadly, and I landed here straight after Andrew Ngā€™s course, plus doing some reading on my own. Iā€™m working through the Goodfellow-Bengio textbook in parallel to doing this course to get both the mathematics and the hands on perspective of neural nets.

Before that, I studied a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, and two MScs, in Industrial Engineering and Aerospace Dynamics. I have previous experience in python, and so far Iā€™m finding the course (Iā€™m at Lesson 3) accessible end enjoyable to follow. The course is also succeeding at making neural nets uncool for me in that NNs look cool and somewhat mysterious from the outside, but once one gets to work with them, they arenā€™t that mysterious.

Currently Iā€™m based in Coventry, England, if by chance anyone else lives nearby. :slight_smile:

  • Jose

Hi everyone!

Jacob from Thailand here. Iā€™m quite new to ML in general, but Iā€™m hoping to receive a machine learning internship at my university this summer. Iā€™m on here mainly to prepare for that, and to eventually build my own projects so that I can start making a little bit of money on the side :smile: .

thatā€™s great to hear - hope I get my slack channel access soon!

Hi, my name is Harrison! Very excited to be part of this community and hope to contribute. My background is in Economics, I then worked in Financial Planning and Analysis for a few years. Didnā€™t really enjoy it (wanted more of an intellectual challenge and to build things), so i quit and have been doing a mixture of self-studying, taking MOOCs and taking a few classes through my local university to catch myself up on CS / AI related topics.

Just happened to stumble upon this resource via this blog post (http://www.fast.ai/2017/04/06/alternatives/) while I was having another one of my inner-debates of whether I should try to get a graduate degree or not (still undecided). My ultimate goal is to become a AI/Machine learning wiz and apply it to problems related to sustainability and helping the environment. Really excited to get started on part 1 of this deep learning MOOC and hope to to be talking to everyone shortly.

p.s - if anyone is also just starting Iā€™d be more than happy to discuss potential study partner relationship to keep us focused and motivated

Harrison

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Hello, my name is Zach and Iā€™m a product manager here in the bay area taking the Practical Deep Learning for Coders MOOC on my own pace. Iā€™ve been a PM for about 6 years now, first in digital publishing and now in the solar industry, both for Java-based applications. I dabble in programming, having taken classes in C++/Java and kind of figured out enough php and mysql to build custom wordpress themes for personal projects. I find having a familiarity with programming helps me as a PM even though I donā€™t write code for a living. Iā€™m interested in deep learning because I think there are so many interesting applications everywhere you look. I am taking the course as a way to build my knowledge on whats possible to accomplish with DL.

My hobbies and interests away from the computer screen include building things with my hands, restoring a 50 y/o pickup truck, brewing beer, playing guitar/ukulele/harmonica, and trying to keep up with my toddler.

So far Iā€™m through lesson 1, and have found this has been more of a learning experience around AWS and bash than anything else, but Iā€™m okay with that. I think Iā€™m going to like the practical approach to the course, which lets me lean in to any area that is interesting.

Edit: I live in the North Bay, so if there are any other like-minded people up here, let me know.

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Hey Zach! How do you like working in the solar industry? Not too long ago I started working for a company in that space / been introduced to many solar companies / renewable energy companies. My interests lie in renewables / anything to lessen our negative impact on the environment. Not sure if these interests align with you - if so would be more than happy to chat over a direct message on this site.

Hello everyone, I am Robi. I am currently an entrepreneur interested in discovering DL opportunities. My background is technical/sales/management in chronological order spanning about 35 years and, independently of what I found myself doing at any point in time in my career, Iā€™ve always been passionate about AI, reading and self-studying what I could.

I and my wife live in Italy and we have two daughters and a son, all abroad for work or study. Luckily, at least our dog is still with us! I like Beethoven, Led Zeppelin and old SF books (I named my DL workstation Simulacron-3 after Daniel Galouyeā€™s book - perhaps exaggerating a bit :slight_smile: )

I am particularly grateful to Jeremy and Rachel for this fantastic one-of-a-kind course, which offers the opportunity to learn in a condensed time frame so many useful techniques.

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Hi!

My name is Alexander and I used to be an economics researcher at the University and then I more or less drifted into the Internet / business niche. Gradually I became more and more tech-savvy to the point I was able to write backends for applications all by myself + administed Linux machines as a hobby.

I am from Russia (Siberia), then I moved to Moscow and build my career there, but now I am frustrated by the course our government and business is taking in general. So now I live and work on Cyprus, which gives me plenty of time to study neural networks and other sorts of machine learning.

One of my frustrations with Moscow / Russia is that after the fall of Soviet Union the scientific and technical part of education is getting worse and worse to the point that new technologies are used only to sell snake oil and spend without the purpose of really doing something real. This is currently the case with machine learning and AI - there is a monopoly by banks and telcos (my girlfriend works in the most IT-savvy bank in the world Tinkoff - but there is so much politics inside - it is awful), but the all the others seem to be interested in this only to ā€œspendā€ money - not build real systems / projects / help people.

Now I am learning a lot about machine learning / data science / deep learning. I really liked the ideas pitched by Jeremy in his educational videos and it inspired me to create our own Telegram channel (itā€™s in Russian, I am thinking about re-doing it in English in future) + website + start a chicken coop project to be able to track events in the life of chickens using deep learning.

Also I was able to get in top 10% in Cats and Dogs and I think in top 10-20% in state Farm competition =)

If anybody speaks Russian here are the links to our things (our goal is to spread the correct ideas for people free of charge - so far in Russian):

Our telegram channel https://t.me/snakers4
Web-feed of the channel http://tele.ga/snakers4/
Our website http://spark-in.me
Neural chicken coop series

If you want to be an author with us and write about anything to educate the world - please ping me (we have 5 authors already).

If you do not know about Telegram - itā€™s a beautiful encrepted messanging / blogging / communication app (a hybrid of facebook messenger / whatsapp / slack and twitter).

Also big thanks to Jeremy and his wife for doing this amazing series and spending so much time of educating the world for free!

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Hi all,

My name is Aki and I live in Helsinki, Finland.

Iā€™m a life long learner and a ā€œhackerā€.

Been interested in Machine Learning ever since I joined Andrew Ngā€™s brilliant Machine Learning course in 2011 - the dawn of MOOCs. After that Iā€™ve followed a many Deep Learning courses including the legendary Hintonā€™s Neural Networks for Machine Learning (didnā€™t pass, but learned a lot). Iā€™ve also followed the beautiful Abu Mostafaā€™s Machine Learning course on youtube. And of course the truly informational cs231n by Andrej Karpathy. I hope Iā€™m not forgetting some course that I should give credit hereā€¦

However, this course has been the first one that gave me the abilities to do my first submissions for Kaggle competitions. And for this I canā€™t even think of a way to give enough thanks to Jeremy and Rachel for this beautifully designed course!

I got my first computer as a present from my dear godfather. This is it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprofessor_II

Thatā€™s how I began my interest in computers. Back in the 1990ā€™s, at the age around 14-15 years I was running my own BBS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system). Ever since Iā€™ve been more than keen to learn everything about computers. :slight_smile:

However, I havenā€™t (never went to uni, at least this yet) got a formal education in Information Technology.

Currently, for bread, I program Perl.

Itā€™s a coincidence, but before joining this course, last December (iirc) I switched my email provider to Fastmail and Iā€™ve been really happy with their service. Thank you Jeremy for the great service! :slight_smile: Only moan about the service is that itā€™s rendering ascii-smileys as happy face images (luckily this ā€œfeatureā€ is only on when viewing the messages and actual recipients see the ascii-smileys as they are).

Of course I would like to help the world with the Deep Learning skills learned here, but if Iā€™m honest, Iā€™ll hope that some day Iā€™ll get an idea for a Deep Learning app that will provide passive income for me for the rest of my life. Then I could more easily concentrate on helping the world with my computer skills. :wink:

Thanks to Jeremy and Rachel for making this course that gives me the possibility to make my dreams come true!

Happy hacking to all of you!

Best regards,
Aki

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Hi fellow DL learners!

My background is biology. Iā€™m interested in using deep learning to solve conservation and social issues. I donā€™t know which yet though.

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Interested in conservation issues. Background in Economics / financial planning and analysis. Iā€™m always looking to lend a hand towards good conservation causes.

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Hi,

My name is Saqib Shamsi. I am from India. I am a Software Engineer with an inclination towards machine learning. I wish to pursue higher education in machine learning. For now, I want to understand and apply machine learning in competitions.

Regards,
Saqib

Good day! I too would like to join the slack channel, but the linked post says I donā€™t have access. Is there another avenue? Also, the platform.ai repository seems to have been moved elsewhere?

Hi @Astayonix,

Youā€™re right, the files have been moved to files.fast.ai:

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Hello everyone!

I just finished both parts of the course and I canā€™t wait for part 3 (or part 0?).

My name is Oren Dar - originally from Israel, currently enrolled in an undergraduate program at an international university and studying around the world :slight_smile:

Iā€™m a CS major and I love data science, and I think this generation of students (myself included) are extremely lucky to have people like Jeremy and Rachel teaching us data science at the highest level without spending several months drowning in complex equations before we ever see code, which makes it accessible even if you donā€™t have a PhD in math.

Iā€™m sure many more students feel exactly the same way as I do, so I would like to personally thank you both from the bottom of my heart.

Hope to see all of you around!

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