I wanted to post to encourage members of the fastai community to apply to the 2019 Deep Learning Indaba being held at Kenyatta university in Nairobi in Kenya in August this year. Applications are open
now and close on the 12th of April. You can apply here: http://www.deeplearningindaba.com/
Indaba?
An indaba is a conference or meeting - the word means “business” or “matter” in isiZulu one of South Africa’s indigenous languages - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indaba
From the Indaba website:
The Deep Learning Indaba 2019 is the annual meeting of the African machine learning community. The 2019 Indaba aims to see 700 members of Africa’s artificial intelligence community for a week-long event of teaching, research, exchange, and debate around the state of the art in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The mission of the Deep Learning Indaba is to Strengthen African Machine Learning.
Awesome speakers
The line up of speakers at the Indaba at the past two events has been fantastic. Some of my particular favourites have been Jeff Dean, Yann Dauphin (see mixup and fixup) and David Silver (of AlphaGo fame).
Check out videos from past years here:
The fastai connection
The Indaba and fastai share the princial of demystifying and democratising access to AI. In fact, @rachel is on the advisory board of the Indaba - http://www.deeplearningindaba.com/organisers-and-advisors.html. She has posted about the organisations series of IndabaX events before - IndabaX: 12 Deep Learning Workshops across Africa, Mar 26 - Apr 6.
@sebastianruder spoke at last year’s Indaba - giving a great summary on the history and current state of NLP.
I know that @poppingtonic, @iskode, @markovbling and @nextM have all been involved in past Indabas and I’d be really interested to see which other forum users have attended in the past!
Hope to see some of you there.
Simon