Hi all, my name is Joshua Robison and I am a Machine Learning Engineer at Paperspace. Paperspace’s ML Ops platform Gradient will be a compute partner of this course. I am here to answer any questions you may have while using the Gradient platform throughout the course as well as see some of the cool projects you all are going to create.
I am super excited for the event and can’t wait to get started!
Hi! I am Omar Espejel. I work at Hugging Face as an ML Developer. Happy and proud to say that whatever little I have achieved in ML was thanks to my start with the fastai courses 
.
I am currently giving a little back by developing an integration between fastai Learners and the Hugging Face Hub. We will be able to upload any Learner to the Hugging Face Hub for free and download any of the ones that are already uploaded 
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Soon we will be looking for the first users 
Let me know if anyone is interested. Also, feel free to join the fast community organization at the Hub.
Thanks to @muellerzr for his kind guidance!
Hi fastai friends!
I am so excited to be here.
I live in Hobart, Australia and I am a data scientist at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
The first part of my career was as a research oceanographer but I have spent the last decade working on data science projects where data and environmental science collide.
I am @JohnsonRob on Twitter.
Hi everyone! Really happy to be here and excited for another fastai course 
I’m in Berlin working as a Data Scientist (more ML Engineer tbh) at FactoryPal, a manufacturing startup that uses ML to provide optimal settings for operators on a production line.
Since we use mostly tree-based models I’ve been procrastinating a deep dive into transformers so really happy they are included in this year’s course!
Is push_to_hub_fastai already available? You are doing really cool stuff.
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 !
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/
Thanks! Almost! Do you want to be in the alpha testers? 
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.
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
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
Yep would love to
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
