Hi everyone,
I am Ismaël Koné from Ivory Coast (West Africa) doing my PhD in Morocco.
My research focuses on developing algorithms to analyse medical images.
I’ve been a fellow of fastai last year. Since I’ve taken this course last year and been a member
of this community some great shifts happened to me:
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I entered an academic competition on breast cancer where I ranked 8th/51. This is not too much but it was very significant for me. By the way, it was during this competition, I made a PR to fastai lib and this was my first contribution to an open source project. Thank you @jeremy for encouraging us to always try.
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Following @jeremy and @rachel on twitter, I knew about the Black-in-AI community and Deep learning Indaba event which I attended about 2 months ago. This was a very awesome networking opportunity where I met @sebastianruder who co-authored the UMLFit paper with @jeremy and also google AI, DeepMind guys, etc…
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Being in these community, I registered to the Data Science Nigeria Summer school. They had a pre-qualification step in which they set up a kaggle competition where I ranked 1st. I used DL for structured data. Microsoft africa granted me the travel from Morocco to Lagos to attend the summer school. Once there mates kept asking me about my solution and told them Fastai and encourage them to register for this iteration. I think this contributes to the concentration of people in Nigeria registered for this course.
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Lately, I’ve been selected to attend the black in AI workshop co-occuring during NIPS 2018. Again a great upcoming opportunity. Hopefully, I’ll get my visa to go to Canada to attend this event.
I’ve been quite long… I’d like to say warm and huge thank to @jeremy and @rachel to make this knowledge so accessible for free so that under represented people like could benefit from.
I’m looking forward to deepen my knowledge in the subjects and boost further my research.