Introductions thread - please say hi!

Thanks @jeremy & @even! Rachel sent this link to me last week since I’d previously discussed my interest with her. Right now I’m just doing a small side project with a ex-Twitter engineer friend of mine, but I’d love to get a fast.ai group together for a proper submission.

Hi everyone I’m Sam. I am also originally from Melbourne, Australia and like Jeremy thought it was boring so I left almost 25 years ago. I now mostly live in Singapore nowadays, but am currently on holidays chasing the northern lights in Iceland. I have a couple of startups that keep me busy including a children’s edu app company that has entertained/educated 4 mil kids around the world. I am also working on ideas for a set of natural language products.

How did you find out about the course? HackerNews/reddit

What are you hoping to do with deep learning? Mostly I am focused on building generative models for text and stuff around Natural Language e.g. Seq2Seq, Q&A, Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts.

What are you passionate about? I am deeply passionate about building conversational agents (not chatbots) that have the ability to learn, store and dispense useful information through conversation. I see these as being the future of customized learning for kids and adults alike as well as a big source of entertainment.

What’s something that not many people know about you? Most people I work with nowadays don’t know I used to write and produce pop music which sold over 3mil units.

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Hi all, super excited to join everyone for this class.

I’m cofounder / CTO of a company called Life360. Life360 is used by millions of families to communicate and coordinate throughout the day. I found out about this class thanks to HN.

Theoretically speaking, I’ve been interested in machine learning since I started coding. Practically speaking, I’m hoping to use deep learning to understand the billions of data points Life360 has coming in every day. So, I’m especially interested on the time series section of the course.

Poker is a huge hobby of mine and how I paid my way through college.

Hi All,

I am a data scientist/machine learning engineer at a small Industrial SAAS startup called Element Analytics.

I found out about the course through my roommate, who is also a DL enthusiast. I had completed part I of the course online, but the material for part II made me want to attend it in person.

I hope to use deep learning to develop scalable techniques for several problems in time series data such as - Root cause analysis, Anomaly detection etc. On the personal side, I am interested in RL (decision making by agents and application to robotics) and NLP problems (particularly understanding, memorization and summarization).

I listen to all kinds of music from classical western, EDM, classic metal, pop, bollywood, rap, hip-hop and k-pop. This drives my friends mad, and I never get to set music during parties.

Hey everyone! I’m James, and I’m attending this course remotely from Bogota, Colombia. In my day job, I do Android OS level stuff for a startup in Ottawa, Canada.

Q: How did you find out about the course? Have you used your knowledge from part 1 on any fun projects yet?
A: I found out about this course on Hacker News. I haven’t yet applied anything for Part 1 to anything concrete, but I’m playing lots.

Q: What are you hoping to do with deep learning?
A: Everything. Deep learning is just getting going. So far, deep learning enjoys some moderate commercial success in a few domains. Give it a few years, and it will be as ubiquitous (for goor and for bad) as micro-controllers are now.

Q: What are you passionate about?
A: Good food, travelling (especially living in new places), and building stuff.

Q: What’s something that not many people know about you?…
A: I love to forage for (and then cook) edible mushrooms. It would be interesting to see if a CNN could beat a trained mycologist at mushroom identification. The stakes are very high for edible mushrooms!

Hi there! My name is Cody, and I’m a MSAN-alumna now working as a Data Scientist at LendUp, a startup dedicated to financial inclusion and connecting the payday loan market with the dignified formal credit sector.

I learned about this course through connections with the USF MSAN program, and while I haven’t leveraged any skills from Part 1 yet (which I completed via MOOC), I’m excited to start playing around.

I don’t have a specific passion project to which I want to apply deep learning, but I’m generally really interested in unsupervised text learning and ability to distill knowledge from large text corpuses, as well as the ability to interpret deep models for the sake of human knowledge. Additionally, I’m interested in understanding reinforcement learning systems so that I can be a contributor to the AI Safety conversation.

I’m passionate about languages (I know French, a reasonable amount of Arabic, and am teaching myself Morse and sign language at the moment), climbing, and the premise that anyone can learn anything if they want it enough.

Something not many people know about me is that is that I adore hosting theme parties, including one called The Great Catsby (20s themed party celebrating newly adopted kittens), and an in-progress two-tiered surprise party.

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Hi All … I am interested in ct scan learning and is trying to work on the lung cancer dataset in Kaggle. I am a Data Science Graduate student and I am in Irving, Texas.

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Hi Everyone,

My name is Dario and I’m an entrepreneur in South Africa with my own machine learning company, Isazi. My background is in computer science and mathematics, with a smattering of quantum chemistry. I’m really interested in how to use data science to solve challenging third world problems, especially in Africa. I found out about Part 1 from a radiologist friend of mine who I am working with to make paediatric radiology more accessible in Africa.

I really enjoyed part 1 and have had some fun applying deep learning so far on some projects in my company:

  • Building a model for detecting, identifying and localising pathologies from x-rays of children’s chests
  • Playing around with denoising autoencoders for DNA data, with the eventual goal of building a precision medicine platform
  • Making something to detect and deproject South African ID books in natural images

There are plenty of things I’d love to use Deep Learning to do. All of the above projects are on-going efforts that need plenty more work. I’m interested in the Kaggle CT scan competition. I think it would be awesome to make a smart alarm system and extend this into a smart gesture and voice controlled home. An app that reads some text and can have conversations about it would be quite fun to build.

I’m passionate about using data and machine learning to solve African problems. I’m specifically interested in healthcare and basic education and how these might be transformed using modern technology.

Something not many people know about me… I enjoy acting and write fiction with my sister. We’re hoping to release our first novel this year :slight_smile:

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hi, I am Ana. I am an SV applied scientist (Natural Language Processing, social media, etc.) - took a couple of years off when I had a kid and am looking for go back to work in the summer.

I took part I of course here in SF (still working through the material :)) and am excited for part II.

My goal is to be comfortable using state-of-art (or close) techniques for text classification and information extraction. Some projects I am interested in are : detecting clickbait and other types of fake news/product reviews, and using deep learning techniques for product recommendation. I am also interested in question answering, an area I worked in before with older style approaches.

I am passionate about politics and in a different life I would have been a journalist.

ps. Here’s my info for those who asked to connect
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anamariapopescu/
https://twitter.com/AMP_SV

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hi - love your idea of DL for children’s books, I am thinking of that as well (i am the mom of a toddler). Will be playing with it on the side, happy to exchange ideas when i am further along :).

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Sounds good. I think there’s a few of us parents interested. I’ve been thinking a little about it and I think the hard part initially is going to be coming up with a reasonable dataset. I’m sure there’s some way we could scrape this but I haven’t figured out from where.

I’m interested in trying to generate both the text and the images if we can, but that’s pretty ambitious. Ultimately I’m thinking it could be an interesting app where kids pick from a few topics or touch things in the image and it tells a story. Probably with new story/networks trained nightly at first but I’d like to see it get up to the level of A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age. I think we’re a ways off from that though. :wink:

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I dream of having something like that for our daughter! :slight_smile:

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Who is that? I wonder if it’s the same person I’ve spoken to about pediatric radiology in Africa… if not, we clearly need to make a connection!

Hi all!

I’m Michael and I’m a cognitive scientist from UC Santa Cruz. Nowadays I live in San Francisco and work as a data scientist. I found this class on hacker news, where I spend far too much time. It was obvious to me that it was essential so I took the plunge.

I’m building data pipelines most of the time. But my true passion is in data visualization. I have an ongoing project related to synesthesia which features many of the same methods as seq2seq. I used to do research in HCI sensory feedback systems. There’s still so much left to be done in that field!

My long term goal is to digitalize the human body. There’s many areas of medical advancement that include machine learning. The area which I find most interesting is the brain’s response to music.

In another life I would have been a landscape painter.

Her name is Jaishree Naidoo - I was introduced to her via her husband, Terence Naidoo.

Hello all awesome people!
This is Sravya and here is my linkedin

How did you find out about the course? Have you used your knowledge from part 1 on any fun projects yet?
I have taken the part 1 of the course and in the last couple months, re-did the content and improved my scores on a couple of kaggle competitions and built my own machine.

What are you hoping to do with deep learning?
Technology wise, I find it very interesting and powerful, so would like to get a good breadth and depth applied expertise in the field. And I have an ever increasing list of things I would like to do/try, which include:

  • Would like to work on lung cancer competition. Would like to witness how far can we go.
  • Can we find global music genres using DL? For example, is spanish music more similar to indian music? Just back from a trip from Mexico and I am amazed at similarities with Indian heritage. And would like to leverage DL to understand how similar we all are across the globe.
  • Try to deploy phone app backed by DL - possibly something like Prism for videos to create our toddler’s videos.
  • Try to run models on a raspberry pie. I see this as a stepping stone for AI/DL in wearables. Imagine your apple watch has your DNA info, your heart rate and medical history, can see what you are eating, how you are sleeping/exercising and can make highly personalized recommendations. If you are from “Quantified Self” community, you will understand this would be a relief from tracking all that data yourself and not using the collected data effectively.

What are you passionate about?
Social impact bug has bit me since a few years and currently looking for high social impact avenues through AI. With AI super powers + growing Impact investing landscape + given that AI community is empathetic (more than tech industry in general I feel), I think this is a prime time for some system shift in how businesses optimize for impact. Would love to get in touch with any one interested. Also curious if there are any EA folks here? Or people experienced with Impact investments?
Here is a blog post that I wrote regarding impact if you would like to learn more.

What’s something that not many people know about you?..
I am a trained classical Indian dancer and I sometimes wonder I might do teaching/researching fusion forms of dance in my retirement :slight_smile:

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Hi,
I am Krishna. Currently I am Masters Student in Data Mining living in Barcelona. Like others, I did lots of courses in Coursera. Prior to my Masters I was a data engineer with IBM.

How did you find out about the course? Have you used your knowledge from part 1 on any fun projects yet?
I found out about the part-1 on youtube. I was hooked after the first lecture.

What are you hoping to do with deep learning?
I like to work more on the creative applications of deep learning. Machine Translation is another topic I would like to explore. (We have a very old language in India called Sanskrit, sadly its almost forgotten. I would work on translating Sanskrit texts to english using deep learning)

What are you passionate about?
I really like learning / building / breaking stuff.

What’s something that not many people know about you?
I love practicing Yoga and playing my acoustic guitar.
Feel free to connect with me on linked in here

Thank you so much for this oppurtunity,
Krishna

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Are they working with Rad Aid?

Hi all! my name is Gidi, and I’m taking this course from Israel.

I’m currently a freelance data scientist, doing all kinds of data science related projects, mostly in fields of image recognition and personalization (recommender engines, customer life time value etc…) and also do introductory lectures/courses to data science and python, and competing in kaggle of course.

I’ve previously held different data related positions (as quant analyst, business data analyst, data team manager) and found that I’m mostly passionate about machine learning and all the innovations in this field, and specifically for creating innovative data products, which I currently work on some :slight_smile:

The first part of the course was really great, and really helped me in organizing my workflow and becoming much more proficient in working with Keras on image recognition projects. I also learned a lot from Jeremy teaching techniques (all the stuff with the notebooks and excels) and philosophy (teaching football vs teaching math).
I really look forward for the second part, learning new techniques, algorithms, tools and tricks.

Besides that I like swimming and playing the guitar, doing some gigs here and there.

Looking forward to start the course, learning and co-operating!

Yup they’re the folks I know - we’d love to help them (and you!) out on the project, so let us know during/after the course how we can best assist.