Welcome back everyone! It’s so good to see these classes starting up again.
I’ve been in the software and hardware engineering fields for a long time. I started with a PDP-8 (look it up) in high school, developed the first microprocessor based systems at Texas Instruments and went on to build and manage several Technology companies over a long career.
I’ve always been interested in what we used to call AI (I know better now). Over the years I kept tabs on the state of art and was very unimpressed. In 2017 or 2018 (not sure now) I came across @jeremy 's Deep Learning course and for the first time felt like this was something a practical programmer could use. Since then I’ve learned more about this field with each new iteration of the courses, reading books and papers on Arxiv.
In 2015 I started a web site that gives local information about live music acts in the Dallas/Fort Worth area (I’m also a performing musician); mainly so that people could easily find live music and get my musician friends more work. To get the raw data for the site I wrote a bunch of web scraping templates that mostly used regular expressions. I saw deep learning as a way to help me automate that process. All I can say is that it did not prove to be quick or easy since I’m still working on it four or five years later. Right now it uses a combination of FAST-AI CNN based image classification, and Hugging-Face BERT based transformers to classify and scrape band and venue information. Because of the wide variety of web templates, the code works ok on some sites and very poorly on others.
My strong suit is programming, I know pretty much every programming language that’s been used from C to SWIFT and of-course python. My weak suit is math (even though I have math and engineering degrees). I just can’t read the math in the Arxiv papers without having my eyes glaze over.
Since I have a technology company, I have machines dedicated to Deep Learning have over the years written some “how-to” posts on the forums describing how to setup FAST-AI on NVIDIA’s Jetson platform (these posts are still out there but probably now only partially useful). I’ll try help every now and then when a programming question pops up, and will always defer to those here that are more knowledgeable in the ML and DL fields. I’m not on Twitter or FB, but I really look forward to working with all of you in the forums!
I am Alex
I am born and raised in Hong Kong, currently working in Singapore as an AI Software Engineer.
I have been following fastai courses and community for a few years. I am attracted by its vibrant and helpful community. Excited to be back and see the forum is bustling with noise and excitement again!
I’m a Senior Security Consultant at AWS. Based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Please feel free to reach out for sagemaker questions. I probably have no idea but will be willing to help escalate for you. Also, if you are interviewing, I can help you out.
I am looking to do a security project this time around!
I’m actually planning to use Sagemaker this iteration of the course, specifically Sagemaker Studio Lab. I’ve applied for the account and once I get it, intend to do a small writeup of my experience. I think this is a good offering and it offers D2L by default. I think it would be cool if it also included fast.ai by default like D2L book exercises (Dive in to Deep Learning)
I have been part of fast.ai courses from the very first Keras version in the year 2016. Since then I enjoy following every iteration of the course and learning a little bit more about deep learning and programming overall.
I am a Kaggle Master in the notebooks category.
I am a mother of a very naughty and super active 6yr old boy. It was challenging to spend time with him and keep up with the pace DL is evolving at the same time. I was on and off with Deep learning since my day job involved primarily building beautiful and functional web pages.
In the earlier versions, I have contributed to posts shared notes about the lessons, and responded to few queries. Looking to complete and understand the course concepts thoroughly this time and build some projects and write blogs around them.
Hello! I’m Pedro from Spain. I make photography apps for iOS and love deep learning, and try to combine both when I can. Jeremy and fast.ai have been a great influence since I took my first course in 2019. I love the pursuit of common sense and simplicity, and all suggestions and remarks (even those done in passing) are solid gold. I fail at writing and communicating, however. I know he and Rachel are right about it, but after I’ve done a project I’m shy because I think it’s still simple and incomplete. Don’t do like me. I’ve set myself a goal to improve in that front this year, so we’ll see! I’m in twitter as @pcuenq.
I care a lot about how we learn and how we can learn and do ML more efficiently.
I learned nearly everything practical I know about ML by taking fast.ai courses.
I now live in Brisbane, Australia thx to my work in AI. I spent most of my life in Poland, but also lived in US, Ireland and Austria. I have not felt as at home anywhere else as I do here.
I’m excited for the new course, and happy to be here. I focus on computer vision with deep learning and fast.ai was my first practical exposure to deep learning models and practices.
I live in Maryland, USA, and I’m looking forward to learning new things in the new course
I’m Wayde and I live in San Diego, CA. I work as a full-stack ML/Web develper at UC San Diego and via my own consulting company, ohmeow.com.
I’ve been a part of the fastai community since the theano days, though most folks probably know me through my work on the blurr library (a fastai-first framework for training Hugging Face transformers with fastai). Btw, for folks new to blurr, fastai, and transformers, I was privileged to host a study group with @init_27 that might be of interest.
I have a master’s degree in theology, a bachelors in history, and so of course I became a software/ML engineer. Outside of coding, I enjoy reading (Tolkien and Asimov are my favs), hanging with my family and dogs (the cats are optional ), drinking a good beer or whiskey, diving, and learning in general. All the core bits I’ve learned about ML are from the fastai course, so if you’re new, you’re in a good place … and if you’re a veteran, you already know that .
I started my journey into machine learning around the same time that the first fastai course was available as a MOOC and v2 was just about to start. I have been participating in the community since then and getting a ton of information from all the talented role models that are here. I started going to a study group every Wednesday which was very beneficial for my deep learning journey.
I have started a new company (problemsolversguild.com). I worked for a Utility company (Alliant Energy) for about a year solving power quality and robotic process automation problems. In September 2021, I took a job at a smaller company that uses a lot of fastai’s tools in the tech stack (mariner-usa.com). We focus on reducing the amount of bad product that is shipped from manufacturing companies by looking at (mostly) existing camera systems that are set up taking good pictures.
It is really exciting to see what is possible when you become part of a community of people that are willing to invest time to help each other and learn collectively. Looking forward to the new course and meeting everybody in discord
Hi everyone,
I am Tanya and took this awesome course in 2018. I am currently a senior science manager at Amazon-Alexa AI, working on conversational AI/NLP research. I live in and work in San Jose, but have loved WFH since the pandemic started
Looking forward to auditing this course and learning from Jeremy.
My fast.ai journey started in 2019 MOOC edition. I really loved Jeremy and Rachael’s application first vs the theoretical approach but I couldn’t sustain my interest.
I also joined the 2020 remote edition of the fast.ai but this time I also joined several study groups (among which were those lead by @wgpubs and @marii). Having a cohort of learners has been a crucial factor in sustaining my interest in deep learning.
I’m most particularly proud of having been part of a still ongoing study group that has been meeting weekly since the pandemic started.
It now lives in the #cluster-of-stars study group on the fast.ai discord server. Everyone is welcome to join us!
for that!
I am Poonam from India. 
), drinking a good beer or whiskey, diving, and learning in general. All the core bits I’ve learned about ML are from the fastai course, so if you’re new, you’re in a good place … and if you’re a veteran, you already know that 
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