Hi, I’m Ben Mainye from Kenya. I came for the course in person in fall 2018 and spring 2019 as a diversity fellow. I’m honored to be chosen again to participate in the course. I was formally trained as a microbiologist but I have many ideas on research and I had limited skill to do them since my undergraduate education didn’t empower me much. It feels like it was leading me to go for a masters degree. Besides, the course was leaning into being a researcher/Academic.
Anyways, where am I in my deep learning journey? After the previous iteration of the course I took a step back to learn and try to grok deep learning by trying to build a deep learning library from scratch using Andrew Trask’s book Grokking Deep learning and notebooks from part 2 last year(ongoing). Before I can continue adding more features to my immune classifier and Mosquito classifier. At the same time, researchers from a laboratory here in Kenya called the Institute of Primate Research really liked it and they’ve collaborated with me to write a research paper about it with the extension to look into neglected tropical diseases. Therefore, at the moment I’m making products around diagnostics and surveillance of intracellular and extracellular parasites. On the other hand, I’m trying to collaborate to finish up another paper about Open science and how it has evolved over the years. Which you can read about here. Plus, I have been collecting data about my skateboarding tricks and I’m gonna develop something interesting as soon as I finish collecting data to help me learn skateboarding better with deep learning 
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What I’d like to get out of the course. I’d like to continue fixing my previous projects to include interesting techniques on data augmentation like Mixup and learn how to use jupyter widgets better especially to edit multiple images at a time by reading the fastai docs and probably contribute to the module dedicated to medical imaging – I think one of the apps I’m making could be useful since it heavily uses ipywidgets. Lastly get better a understanding of Image Segmentation.
If you want to know more about me. You could check out my upcoming blog or portfolio site here. If you can, please give me feedback.
Thanks again for the opportunity Jeremy, Rachel , Sylvain and USF!
Twitter @Shuyin_ben.