Hi everyone I am Nok, a software engineer at Quantumblack London. fast.ai brought me to the world of deep learning and open source software and inspire me to become a software engineer. I now work for kedro, a open source Python framework for data science.
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Hi, my name is Darek and I live in Warsaw, Poland. Thanks to fastai, I fell in love with deep learning, started competing on Kaggle, became an ML practitioner and recently got a new job as ML Engineer at Weights & Biases. I like fitting models, practicing kung fu, and playing with my daughter. Looking forward to participating in the course!
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This is Jose-Adolfo Villalobos, from Peru. I am delighted to see FASTAI come back to life again after so many months. I am a data scientist and app developer trying to use AI and mobile communications to help manage Health and Safety in the workplace.
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Hi everyone,
I’m Nick and I’m in Arkansas in the US. I have a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and I leverage deep learning NLP based models. I started leveraging awd-lstm and fastai’s api about 4 years ago and really enjoyed Jeremy’s teaching style and all the awesome work the community was doing at fastai. Excited to see how fastai is integrating Transformers!
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I am super excited 
and happy to be part of the new fast.ai course.
I am Vishnu from India. I started my DL journey from the first version of fast.ai, and have been attending the course every year since then. Fastai course, the community, and Jeremy Howard have immensely contributed to my learnings and the startup journey.
Building Jarvislabs.ai: Left my job by end of 2019 and started building Jarvislabs.ai with a couple of friends. After exploring multiple ideas, started building a GPU cloud where anyone can come and get started with DL in a few clicks.
Tried to launch before the 2020 fast.ai course, but got delayed due to Covid, lockdown, and server shipments. Building products was something completely new to all of us, we had close to 0 knowledge about a lot of things like product launch, finding customers, and much more. Launched the first version in early 2021 with basic features.
We got our early adopters from the fast.ai community, who gave us valuable feedback, spoke about us on social media, and introduced us to their companies. It’s a scary journey, but the community made it less scary 
thankfully we are able to make steady progress.
Kaggle journey: I Joined Kaggle in 2014, tried participating a few times, and eventually gave up as I started believing ML is for geeks not for someone like me. Things changed after the first few videos of the fast.ai 1st course. I was able to make a few submissions and see my name in the LB, that was a wow moment. Just following the steps provided by Jeremy was able to place myself in the top 10%. With this new confidence, I was able to win 6 silver medals and 2 bronze medals in the last few years.
Exploring about
- DL model deployments
- Transformers
- AI in art
- New product ideas.
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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!
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I am very excited the course comes back and I am part of it.
My name is Alex, I live in the US and currently, I am a Data Science Lead at AWS.
@jeremy 's courses over these years (and the book) helped me to grow immensely professionally.
I am excited and looking forward to this course.
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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!
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Hi, my name is James Dietle.
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!
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for that!
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)
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Hi everybody! 
I am Poonam from India. 
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.
I currently work at JarvisLabs.ai - a simple and no-setup GPU cloud.
You can find me on Twitter | Linkedin | Medium | Blog
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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.
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Hey friends!
Great to be here!
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 am @radekosmulski on Twitter.
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Hi All,
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
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Hey! Good to see someone from Hong Kong here.
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Wow
Same here! 
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Love your guys’ work Vishnu!
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Hello everyone.
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 
.
You can find me on twitter @waydegilliam or on github @ohmeow
… and yes, I’ll be watching atleast the first session live at 1am PDT (wouldn’t miss it)
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We should hang out 
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A fellow PDT attendee 
1am-3am will be hard but I think I can make it work 
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