Hi All,
I am Sai ,Sr. Data science consultant at WNS global services. I would like to solve business problems with ML /AI ,I admire Jeremy so joined this course.It will be great to learn with community . Looking forward to learn and upskill !
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Hi
David Watts from Brisbane here. Previous analyst and now developer but have an interest in machine learning. Have experimented with python and jupyter notebooks before and came across Jeremy which is why I am here. Also very slowly completing comp sci post-grad at UQ. Not active on twitter but portfolio/github etc is at https://dwatts.com.au/
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Thanks! Almost! Do you want to be in the alpha testers? 
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Hey everyone, I’m Karl. I’ve been part of the fast.ai community since 2018. My background is in chemical engineering and molecular biology. I worked for several years lab-side at various pharma and biotech companies. In 2019, I switched to doing data science/ML work full time, mostly in the pharma space.
For the last year I decided to take a break from industry and I’ve been doing a mix of traveling and short term contracting/consulting, working on both code-producing tech projects and data science strategy consulting. I’ve also recently taken up an interest in decentralized finance and smart contract development.
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Hi, I’m Allen from Brisbane.
Data Science & Dev background (non-python), I’ve been following and participating within the fastai sphere for a few years. It is a supportive learning community.
I attended some data ethics meetups last year that Rachel organised, wonderful mind-opening discussions, hoping we have some more this year.
Inspired by those, I have contributed time when I can to open dataset projects such as Home - LAION
Have been working more in python and notebooks over the last year, and even had a couple of small PR’s accepted in the fastai repo, so I feel more ready to absorb.
Excited to be attending the sessions ‘in-person’ for the first time, and looking forward to meeting all the keen minds. 
My goals this time round are
- to apply more of what I learn to solve problems.
- and blog more … Data Science and Machine Learning Resources | Inferred.ai
- and as always, have fun learning something new.
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Greetings Forum Community,
After several years participating in the forums, and seeing many of my favorite members posting in this thread, it seems the time to post a bio. Mine will be a bit longer, since I’ve lived many more years than most forum members.
I am an involuntarily retired curmudgeon, having worked in a dozen+ computer languages, and seen most of them supplanted by the “next great thing”. It always happens. I started out in high school with Fortran on punched cards, but quickly moved on to APL, timeshared on the IBM 360. In those days, computer pirates stole CPU time, not identities, because CPU time was strictly rationed and we geeks wanted to learn more and have fun.
I graduated from Harvard in Applied Math in 1977. At that time, research in AI was a career killer, but I always secretly kept an interest in it. The problem then and now is the lack of a massively parallel computational substrate. After graduation, it was a privilege to work with Bob Rodieck in his University of Washington lab, mapping retinal neurons and the LGN. I was a lowly lab tech, but eventually co-authored a paper with him. I would like to think that his discoveries about the vertebrate retina have informed the design of ML vision models.
After a period as a database consultant, I started a business that developed and sold FileMaker plug-ins. It had its heyday and put money in the bank. I added a master’s from Naropa University in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology in 2001, but never became a therapist. It’s hard enough keeping one’s own life together, let alone those of clients.
There are many life episodes that will never make it onto a resume. Fortunately, this introduction is not a job application. Meditation teacher, street musician, dance caller, cult member, daycare worker, ultramarathoner, stock trader, ex-Burner, SAT/AP tutor, psychonaut, cancer survivor.
Machine learning hit the public consciousness about six years ago. I was fortunate to find fast.ai and Jeremy’s clear lessons right away. ML may be a “next great thing”, but it is still the most interesting game in town, and it fulfills a life-long dream. My plan was eventually to learn the field and land a job. However, it seems the corporatocracy only wants to hire recent PhD graduates who will work 80 hours for 40 hours pay. C’est la vie and not for me.
I strive to be a helpful and welcoming presence on these forums, and refrain from giving advice. Posting has been a long journey of building confidence. Posting for the first time, in March 2017, almost induced a panic attack from the public exposure, but now I can hardly shut up. Mathy questions are a specialty, as are hard questions that do not get any response, even if I do not have a ready answer. It’s discouraging to post a sincere question and hear back only silence. I also enjoy hard “how to do it with PyTorch” problems. This may be a holdover from APL, where there were competitions to see who could perform a task with the least number of characters.
Looking forward especially to Jeremy’s lesson on Transformers. I understand the “what” (it’s just math), but not the “why”. Understanding “why” is essential for designing a model that fits the problem.
See you on the forums!
Malcolm
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Yep would love to
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Hi I’m Sambit. I’m a data scientist at a company called Xelp.
I have experience creating tabular data models (linear / tree-based) for the retail & fast moving consumer goods industries.
Since last year, I have progressed to deep learning, and am currently building NLP models (QA, NER & relation extraction) for the legal-tech & pharma industries.
Looking forward to new friendships & interactions!
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Hi, I’m Krasin. I’m teaching about aviation, aircrafts and safety at Technical University of Sofia. Understanding how things work is my passion. I try to understand neural networks from signal processing point of view and to improve my programming skills. My twitter is @gkrasin
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Hello all, my name is Jack from Melbourne Australia. Began my ML journey during lockdown last year and was referred to fastai by a retired professor from Uni.
Currently working as a Systems Engineer in the railway industry. At the moment I’m thinking and prototyping ways to incorporate ML to solve and improve user experience, system limitations and finding new opportunities for future growth.
Looking forward to the lectures and to the conversations with fellow ML professionals and enthusiasts.
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Hi, I’m Matt and I live in Brisbane, Australia. I feel so fortunate that I’ll be able to attend the course in person at the University of Queensland. It’ll be a bit of a homecoming for me. This is where I completed a PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2000. Since then I worked in research and universities in the US before moving back to Australia in 2005.
I’ve worked in industry roles since then and am the Lead Data Scientist at Damstra Technology. Most of my machine learning and data science experience has been using R but I have been working on adding Python to my toolset over the last year so that I can better leverage Deep Learning, NLP, Transformers and adapt solutions to production environments.
I publish a tiny newsletter on LinkedIn called Data Science Code in Python + R and can be found on twitter @machinatoonist and on my blog.
Fast.ai has been on my radar for a few years now - my first attempt stalled at the point of trying and failing to figure out how to build a dev environment on AWS. My renewed focus is a result of getting deeper into NLP and having a taste of what is possible with DL and Transformers from the wonderful people and course at Hugging Face. I have also discovered how much easier it is to start building useful things with GPUs on Google Colabs. Super keen and excited to leverage the fast.ai course and this great community to help solve problems that really make a difference for people in the world.
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Hi @espejelomar ! am very keen to connect the dots between fast.ai and Hugging Face. I have been wondering how it is possible and if I would be better to tackle Tensorflow and Keras/PyTorch head on. I’m very happy to see your introduction and news. It gives me confidence that I’m in the right place
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Hello all, I’m Niyazi from Turkey, Istanbul.
After working 15 years as an Architect for different companies, I switched my career and became a Technical Sales Specialist at Autodesk ten years ago (maker of AutoCAD / Revit, etc.). I have some deep learning knowledge thanks to some courses (fastbook was a big leap) and some good people.
I hope that I can pull a rabbit out of the hat and switch my career one more time.
My blog is niyazikemer.com and my Twitter is @niyazi_kemer
I like reading books and riding mx bikes.
Thanks to @jeremy for making all these possible.
Niyazi
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Hello everyone! Long time fan of fast.ai, super excited to be here. I have been lucky to have virtually attended the classes. I have even published a Live Project with manning publications on how to build a recommendation system with fast.ai. On my day job I work as a lead AI and Machine learning engineer for Athenahealth doing NLP. One of my first machine learning deployments was to build a classifier using fast.ai’s NLP classes. Looking forward to learning with all of you! Ariel
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Hi everyone,
This is Arshath from Malaysia. I work as an administrator in the healthcare space. For the past few years, I have been dipping my feet into ML. Like many, I owe whatever I have learned to Jeremy, fastai and this wonderful community.
Looking forward to learning from you all!
Twitter: @arshyma
Regards,
Arshath
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Hi, my name is Bruce. I’m a HW engineer in silicon valley, and want to learn as much as I can about deep learning. I took a past version of this course and am excited about attending again. I’m using generative art as the project to work on my coding skills in Pytorch. Eventually I want to include generative audio. Have lots of ideas for things to try and look forward to the projects in this course.
Twitter: BruceHolmer
Instagram: bruceholmer
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Hi, I am Qisheng, and I am also called Sunny. I am doing my PhD of computational biology, especially on protein structure and mutations in UQ.
Very glad to join this course! Hope everyone doing well! 
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Hi,
I’m Ben Mainye, a microbiologist from Kenya. I introduced myself in a previous iteration which you can find here. I made the immune cell classifier with some of my classmates. Now, with colleagues from the Institute of Primate Research, we made one that detects causative agents plus some stages of their lifecycles of L.donovani, T. b. rhodesiense , P. berghei as well as help count the number of parasites in the image. I am currently working on publishing my results to AfricArXiv – in a few weeks 
. I am also thinking about effective data science infrastructure to support the project above and slowly getting back to doing bioinformatics/genomic data science to enrich the project. Hoping to learn more state of the art Natural language processing techniques and loss functions related to measuring similarity and differences between string representations from the course.
Looking forward to interact with everybody. Its great to be back.
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Hi Everyone,
I’m Pranav from the Indian state of Kerala currently residing in Delhi. I am currently doing an undergraduate degree in Programming and Data Science. I am a huge fan of Basketball and I enjoy playing RPG games.
I have been doing the 2020 Fast.ai course along with the book for a while now. I love the course material, the teaching and the teaching style. I am very excited to participate in this course and take myself forward.
I thank Jeremy and everyone else who made this course possible. A special shoutout to @muellerzr (A walk with fastai course was full of great insights and techniques) and @init_27 (I love your podcast).
Thanks
Pranav
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Hi - I’m Nigel and I live in Brisbane, Australia. I am a teacher, but have worked in the Queensland Department of Education for ten years now. It’s hard to summarize what I do but it’s usually about supporting Qld state schools to use data to inform decision making and the social and industrial architectures of practice that surround taking an inquiry approach to improvement. My professional background is in literacy and language development and I’m not an analyst, and will be learning most things from scratch in the course. It’s going to be a stretch for me but I’m excited about the challenge.
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