Nikhil here from Bangalore, India. Been in the software industry for 19+ years (in Networking & Telecom domains). Have been dabbling into ML for the past 3+ years. Took a mid-career break last year to build some ML apps (specifically NLP on twitter data). Started well (BERT vs ULMFiT) but ended up doing lot of travel post that. And now I have to worry about getting back to the industry as I approach the end of my runway. Have picked up on my goal again and currently looking to train BERT from scratch for English, Hinglish & Hindi languages. If anyone wants to collaborate, kindly PM me.
Thank You to Jeremy and Fastai team for the privilege to be a part of this acclaimed group.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NikhilUtane
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilutane/
Hi all. My name is Matthijs and I’m from the Netherlands. I am a freelance consultant in the field of machine learning for mobile. In other words, companies hire me to add ML to their apps.
I’ve watched all the fast.ai videos all the way back to the very first one. I keep coming back every year because there are so many useful tips & tricks in these lectures. 
One of my goals for this year is to turn my ML / software engineering skills into a product. Consulting can be fun, but it’s time to start doing my own products again.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mhollemans
Website / blog: https://machinethink.net/blog/
Wow: @machinethink has also authored books for https://www.raywenderlich.com (one of the best iOS learning websites)
Matthijs, have you experimented with fastai or PyTorch on mobile? Would love to hear your thoughts on the current state of things.
Thanks in advance!
Hi Sanyam, love your podcast. 
I have not experimented with PyTorch on mobile yet. I like the idea but as far as I know it currently only uses the CPU (at least on iOS), which is not powerful enough for the sort of thing people want to do on iOS (usually computer vision related). But it’s definitely on my to-do list. 
(I do quite often convert models from PyTorch to Core ML, which is iOS’s built-in framework.)
I’ve been thinking of this as well. Let us know when you get started building and/or need more hands. Good luck 
!
They were pretty good. The course provided a good overview with Carlos and Emily alternating on the courses. They covered a few of the topics I haven’t seen covered in other Moocs ( Like Adaboost, Gibbs Sampling etc).
The downside was that the MOOC was tightly coupled to their framework Graphlab/Turi.
The last 2 modules were supposed to be on NN and a capstone project on Deep Learning when it stopped. And I was really bummed about it. But then fast.ai came along shortly and its been great ever since
Thanks Jeremy for the message, sorry I was a way for the last two weeks. Here are the papers and the links:
M. Sayed and F. Baker, “Thermal Face Authentication with
Convolutional Neural Network,” Journal of Computer Science, vol.
14, no. 12, pp. 1627-1637, 2018.
https://thescipub.com/pdf/10.3844/jcssp.2018.1627.1637
M. Sayed and F. Baker, “E-Learning Optimization Using Supervised
Artificial Neural-Network.,” Journal of Software Engineering and
Applications, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 26-34, 2015.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperabs.aspx?paperid=53428
N. Zaeri, F. Baker and R. Dib, “Thermal Face Recognition
using Moments Invarients.”, International Journal of Signal Processing
Systems, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 94-99, 2015.
http://www.ijsps.com/uploadfile/2014/1210/20141210041259973.pdf
M. Sayed and F. Baker, “Blended Learning Barriers: An Investigation,
Exposition and Solutions,” Journal of Education and Practice, vol. 5,
no. 6, pp. 81-85, 2014.
https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/JEP/article/view/11212
Hi All.
My name is Sergii. Originally from Ukraine, live in Poland, work for Mountain View as Deep Learning Engineer thanks to fastai part 1 2017. We are doing lots of interesting CV/NLP stuff for e-commerce.
I was trying to attend the course in person but yesterday I was refused to obtain B1/B2 visa for studying purposes.
My main goal now is to help people who just start their journey and refresh basics.
My understanding is that you can join the certificate course (it’s only 2 hours per week) with a plain tourist visa, as long as the main purpose of your trip is not study. I’m not an expert on this however, but this is based on I’ve heard from previous participants. When you arrive at immigration they ask you what the purpose of your trip is.
That was my understanding as well. However this is what US Embassy in Krakow explained to me:
Good afternoon, Mr. Makarevych. We conferred with the DOS Legal department and they agreed that the class cannot be taken on a B1/B2 visa. Per the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) 9 FAM 402.2-4(B)(9) (U): “An alien enrolling in such a school may be classified B-2 if the purpose of attendance is recreational or avocational in nature.” Due to the fact that the course results in Deep Learning certification means that it can’t fairly be considered “recreational” or “avocational.” In addition, the course results in 1.5 hours of continuing education credits. (The Institute’s website lists both that the course results in a certificate and in continuing education credits. https://www.usfca.edu/data-institute/certificates/deep-learning-part-one) Therefore, if a student is taking this course on a B1/B2 visa, they are misusing the visa.
Wow. This is an epic thread. So many cool people doing cool things!
I’m late to the party but I’m Jason Antic, the creator of DeOldify. I live in San Diego, California. Previously I was a software engineer- I just put in my two weeks notice there yesterday because I now have a business, with @plain-old-dana, thanks to fast.ai 
I am personally really looking forward to this course and the new fastai v2 library, because I know they’re the product of lots of careful research, distillation, tinkering and experimentation, and thought. I need new ideas, perspectives and tools, and this is exactly where I need to be.
twitter: https://twitter.com/citnaj
deoldify: https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify
Oh no. I’m so sorry to hear that.
Did you by any chance mention that you’ll also be doing sightseeing etc? Or attend other conferences and spend the other days not working?
To anyone else planning to visit SF to undertake the course and has to sit in the course, might I suggest 9 FAM 402.2-4(A) (U) Visitors for Pleasure point 9 which states:
(U) Short Course of Study: The following annotation is to be placed in the 88-character field of the visa for aliens coming to the United States primarily for tourism, who also incidentally will engage in a short course of study during their visit: STUDY INCIDENTAL TO VISIT—Form I-20 NOT REQUIRED.
According to which, if your primary reason to visit the US is tourism, you can also enage in a short couse of study during the visit.
Yes, I did. The main goal was to go to see good buddies from previous fastai courses, sightseeing and only after that - fastai 2020 part 1 which takes only a couple of hours per week. It did not work.
I am almost amazed to see that while it says so on the website that you can take a short course if you’re visiting the US, they still denied the visa.
I’m really sorry to hear that @sermakarevich looks like a big lose for the SF Community against (VERY) confusing Visa laws. 
Looking forward to the 2020 version of the course. I have watched all the 2019 and 2018 video’s and can’t wait to see what is in store for this year.
I am a PhD student and love hearing about Jeremy’s approach to research. I have learned so much from him!
Esteban Guillen
Anybody here from A Coruña, Spain?
There is a group of people (part of the Zara engineering team) looking for a local study group.
Hi, my name is Suren.
I started this journey a couple of years ago, when I took the v0.7 course with the TWIML community, and I haven’t looked back since. Can’t wait for this new version of the course.
1000 thanks to Jeremy for the DL course, and Rachel for the Lin Alg and NLP courses.
Medium: I document my journey here. 
I’m Edward Hiscoke from Sweden here for a second round of Fast.AI. This time I hope to complete the whole course and not just get stuck in the first half. Although I saw the whole course during the previous recording sessions (at 3am over here) I was starting a new job and couldn’t find the time to fit in family life, work life and a deep learning course at the same time. Still, I did get around to training a model for judging the ripeness of tomatoes which I intend to expand upon this time round and hopefully enhance with object detection (would just love to do some juicy object detection on those tomatoes).
I’m 52, work as an IT-consultant with IT-architecture and development, and have been working in the industry since the late 80:ies. I’ve always been interested in the area of AI and machine learning, but lacking the formal background in mathematics I shied away from the subject until Jeremy and Rachel using Fast.ai showed the top-down way in that got me started. It’s humbling to see all the math heavy presentations here and though I’ve only started on this journey, the previous course and the labs inspired and taught me so much that I ended up holding an evenings “get started with Fast.AI” last spring for a crowd of twenty something developers.
So thank you Jeremy, Rachel and everyone else on the team for the hard work you put into Fast.AI, sharing your skills, democratising AI and inviting me to join in. And I’m really looking forward to the book. I’m sure it’ll be a cracker!
Finally a hello to everyone on the forum: it’s invigorating to see everyone is so excited about the course. Lets all help out where we can to make this a great learning experience. And if anyone else from the Swedish town of Jönköping is interested, how about we start a local study group?