Introduce yourself here

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! :wink:

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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 :crossed_fingers: . 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.

You can find me :point_down:
Shuyin_ben Twitter
Blog
Github

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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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Hello Everyone,

My name is Sanjib, who is a Mathematician and completed PhD by building a numerical model which can be applied in different industries including mining, civil and manufacturing. Currently, I am working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia where I am applying different Machine Learning algorithms to predict the roof deformation in underground coal mining. I am very excited to develop my skills by first time attending this course. I am happy to connect with some professional ML expert globally through my LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/sanjib-mondal-phd-68198654) profile and looking forward to you for further discussion during the course. Thank you everyone.

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Hi Everyone,
My name is Dave and this is my first fast.ai course. Looking forward to it.
I live in Brisbane and work in a ‘startup’ business in the travel space. Curious about most things but particularly how we could possibly use ML/AI in our current setup.
My background is in software engineering and I am ashamed to say I have never developed in Python! Always time to learn something new.
See some of you tomorrow hopefully.

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chimay, la chouffe, kwak, rochefort, leffe, westmalle… some of my favs, lot more others I can’t remember. Count me in ! :beers:

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Hi, I am Fawaz, and I live in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I am the Director of Economic Intelligence at the Ministry of Economy and Planning in Saudi Arabia.

I majored in IT and Computing at university, and I worked in many fields: business intelligence, CRM, budget, digital communication, knowledge management, and economics.

I believe in continuous learning, and I always push myself to learn more to make myself useful. The internet has enabled me to learn from the best.

I am very interested in Artificial Intelligence. I started doing Fastai courses in 2018; I never really graduated from any of the previous Fastai courses because of the high tenacity requirement.

I am determined to finish the course this time, and I have many ideas that I would like to implement and experiment with my fellow students. I hope I will be helpful to the Fastai community this time.

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Hello Everyone,

My name is Naveen. I’m a Master’s student in Computer Science. This is my first live Fastai course and I hope to learn a lot from you guys.

Looking forward to the course intro today!

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Hi, I am Muntasir Joarder and I’m living in Brisbane, Australia. I am currently working as Data Engineer in a Healthcare organisation.

I really appreciate the Deep Learning course that Jeremy developed and for quite some time I attempted to complete the full course but I couldn’t. So this time, I got myself admitted into this course and hope to concentrate.

It a pleasure to know you all and I hope we can work together on some interesting projects in near future.

Regards
Muntasir Joarder

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:wave: In my first job, we also programmed in APL on mainframe terminals. Seems like yesterday!

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Hi everyone!

I’m Ned, from Sydney but currently living in Canberra. I’m a PhD candidate at the 3A Institute studying participatory design of applications enabled by language models. I’m really looking forward to the NLP section of this course! I have trained some deep learning models using PyTorch and the fast.ai library, but I hope to go much deeper in this course to understand how it is all working.

Previously I worked as a human rights lawyers in Australia and Guatemala, and a management consultant in Australia and the UK.

https://twitter.com/nedcpr

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Hi, I’m Arto from Kyiv, Ukraine. I’m chaotic ML enthusiast mostly focused on NLP.

I’ve been following fastai courses for a while but this would be my first live course. I’m super-excited about learning with all of you!
I’m hoping to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, draw creative inspiration and connect with more people doing deep learning for fun and for good.

You can find me on github, twitter, linkedid and my rare blogposts here.

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Hi there @jeremy and fellow participants.

I’m currently based in Tunis, Tunisia. I am currently the CEO of a 6-year old Tunisian NGO who works to empower the youth of a deprived neighbourhood in the country’s capital - we do that by providing all sorts of activities, art, culture, sport and technology and simultaneously work hard to ensure public officials take on board the issues faced by youth in similarly deprived areas of the country and try to take them into consideration when making policy decisions.

In 2021, after 19 years, I left my first employer, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a humanitarian organisation that works to help those affected by wars.

I originally studied my BA in Arabic and Turkish and recently finished my Master’s in English Linguistics which involved studying about Critical Discourse Studies and Corpus Linguistics.

I am married and have 2 daughters. I used to play rugby for many years and recently set up my own website johnstrick.com in order to be able to publish what I write, mainly about Life, Linguistics & Coding.

My twitter handle is @nomadikal.

Looking forward to meeting you all on this fascinating course.

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Hi Ned. Great to see your journey and that there are others who come from an International Law background.

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Forgot to mention that I’m looking forward to learn about real-life applications of Deep Learning models.

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Hello all,

I’m Andrew Myers from Adelaide working at Maptek. Only recently become more active in learning about Deep Learning and am interested in applications within the mineral resources industry.

Looking forward to the course.

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Hi Fellow Students,

I live in Lithuania :lithuania: at the moment and I am originally from Poland :poland:.

I’ve been working with code for over 20 years and working in python with data since 2019, but I am interested in Data Science since 2nd iteration of Andrew Ng’s ML course (~2013). Also I’ve been following Jeremy’s courses for few years, but never had time to actually deep dive.

I am a Data Engineer in marketing now and I’d like to be more useful to the society so really eager to learn more about deep learning and meet people that I can collaborate with for this course and hopefully even later.

Other things that interest me are neuroscience, economy and longevity and I like to listen to Lex Friedman’s podcast.

I have a 3 yo daughter so I will be mostly spending early mornings learning when she is still asleep 2-4am GMT. I am on fast.ai Discord (misza222#0173) so ping me if you are working around the same time :slight_smile:

If you’d like to learn more about me as a programmer, here is my linkedin

See you around in a virtual class!

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Hi all and thank you @jeremy!

Long time listener, first time caller.

My name is Madhava and I live in Brisbane and will be attending the in person course starting this evening! Woohoo!

I am a self educated Software Engineer who has been using computers since they ran DOS 3! When I saw TF back in 2015 and read that NNs were universal function approximators I decided to leap on the bandwagon and learn everything I could about ML/AI one step at a time.

I did the first Udacity AI Nanodegree cohort in 2017 and did a bunch of intro linear alg / ml courses on Udacity.

Later, I came across FastAI while working at a MedTech startup and used it to finetune resnets and get an F1 score of around 0.89 on a pretty questionable quality retrospectively labelled private dataset.

I was also briefly part of the FastAI Audio telegram group and got some code merged: GitHub - fastaudio/fastai_audio: [DEPRECATED] 🔊️ Audio with fastaiv1

When COVID happened we missed a funding round, so the startup couldnt pay me anymore and I ended up back in Australia and unemployed so I did some volunteer work on a variety of things including COVID Watch.

Eventually I found my way to working at OpenMined http://openmined.org/ doing Privacy Enhancing Technology (AI for private data) where I work on an Open Source PET library called PySyft:
GitHub - OpenMined/PySyft: A library for answering questions using data you cannot see

While I am working on a data science library on a day to day basis you would be surprised at the lack of ML work that happens in lieu of normal engineering tasks and traditional coding. So I am hoping to both force myself and give myself the excuse / time to really hone in on the Fast AI material and also to learn the latest and greatest especially things like Transformers which were developed after I last spent decent time applying any DL models to data!

The FastAI ethos and Jeremy’s approach has always appealed to me as someone with no formal education and while I understand some basic concepts already, I want to truly grokk the material from both top down and bottom up so that no aspects of the system are a black box.

As a side note im also forcing myself through Tivadar Danka’s Mathematics of machine learning: despite struggling with the mathematical syntax, perhaps because I also love to suffer. :joy:

I am looking forwards to meeting everyone, learning, helping out and doing some cool things with Fast AI!

Feel free to add me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/madhavajay

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