Official project group thread

Added a Student Project Section:

We now have a group of us that will be doing a Mid-level API Deep Dive & we also have A mini competition (with some very fun rules)! :smiley:

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This is really a bummer to see that it’s 100% men (even though very friendly) but it’ll make all too difficult for any other gender to come and see all those men faces talking about super nerdy stuff.

Maybe we could all disable our cameras and leave just Jeremy’s camera?
and activate our camera only when we talk?
It’s a bit radical but could work to make it less intimidating when entering the zoom session.
I myself was pretty intimidated when connecting to the group yesterday and when Jeremy asked me to present myself a few minutes later I was extremely intimidated and mumbled a few words.

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Hi guys,

I managed to join for the first hour yesterday, but missed the second part (which seems like when everybody shared their projects).

Is it resuming at the same time again today, on the same Zoom link?

I agree with the sentiment here. I spent a lot of time in the Zoom chat yesterday and there was a considerable gender disparity (to which I was admitedly contributing!).

My initial impression of the Zoom room:- it’s a great place to watch @jeremy go about his work and when he is not online, to listen to what i’d consider in general to be a fairly advanced level conversation. As a resource, that’s incredibly useful (and it was genuinely mind-blowing at times), but its also not an environment i’d feel comfortable speaking up in.

Whilst everyone came across as extremely friendly, it seemed a majority were alumni of previous fast.ai courses and already knew one another. The average level of experience also seemed very high. For a first time timer with little deep learning experience that = serious imposter syndrome.

Perhaps some kind of separate group for those who are new(ish) to deep learning / haven’t attended the course before would help. :slight_smile:

I hope this doesn’t come across as negative. I really want to reiterate how friendly and interesting the Zoom room was yesterday. But in terms of forming a study/project group, I feel such a large disparity in knowledge will leave people like myself unable to contribute and therefore not getting as much out of the course as they’d like to.

As a side note, the Discord server seem locked down, so its not possible for individuals to create new channels on the server. I’m not sure if that was intentional, but I gather from the thread the idea was that students had the flexibility to do that themselves?

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I think @PDiTO has a good point. I remember there were times when some of us were discussing things like perceptual losses from last year’s course and some terminal hacks to make working easier. I would agree that for beginners, it may have been a bit hard to follow and might have even been a bit intimidating. If I had the same knowledge right now as I did when I was starting out, I might have felt a bit uncomfortable. Since a lot of us were FastAI alumni, we unintentionally forgot that the group would also have newcomers.
Apologies!

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I think it is great that you and a bunch of other people are speaking up on this topic :blush: Such feedback is super valuable and I bet very much appreciated by everyone in the community.

As far as I understand, everything that happens in this course should be geared towards making people new to deep learning feel at home.

Probably its not newer people who should find a new Zoom chat for themselves, but the people who are on a second, third or fourth iteration of the course should look for a new place for themselves :slight_smile:

Ability to talk to each other is also new to us, to the people who have been around these parts for longer (before we only used the forums and not AV software), so please forgive us! I’ll try to still hop on that Zoom chat but will only participate in discussions with newer involving everyone and on matters that might be interesting to everyone taking the course, that includes people starting with zero machine learning experience.

BTW maybe some of the topics were intimidating, but all of us very much remember how we were getting started (since it was not that long ago :wink: ) and also truth be told, the longer you do this, the longer you see (as Jeremy has pointed out numerous times in the past) that noone knows what they are doing :slight_smile: This discipline is very novel and more so than not we are all just fumbling around! Besides, I don’t think evolution prepared any of us for writing ML code, at least not me! :grin:

We are all in the same boat!

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Thanks so much for sharing your experience @PDiTO!

It was also a moment of meeting our friends for the first time in a new dimension, many of us old-time students who refuse to move onto any other course in the world, recognise each other very well and were also comfortable with speaking to each other too.

Even though I had no idea of a lot of things that were being discussed, For ex: radek mentioning about embeddings and how you could use them or Akash talking about advanced Math heavy topics, but what I did in the meantime was make notes of the keywords and the person’s name who are experienced in that field. I hope to do my homework and ask them about it, if I find it interesting. I’m sure all of us would be very open to talking to each other. I think Radek might remember how I used to ask so many stupid questions to him!

I would also say, please don’t be hesitant to talk to the people in the call, we can always use “breakout rooms”-discord/etc to chat more. There are never any stupid questions.

All of us are here to learn a lot from each other, and continue learning over and beyond the next few weeks :slight_smile:

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Also FYI if it wasn’t clear, the call never ended :wink: Feel free to join at any time!

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I too joined for the initial bit where the discord server was setup and the links shared to join.

I am based out of India and 10 AM - 3 PM PT is pretty much sleep time. If anyone can share a summary of any ‘critical’ things that was discussed, it will be helpful. If it is already shared, would be great if a link can be shared.

Regards
Ganesh Bhat

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Hello Everyone! Great initiative re the zoom call ! I couldn’t attend the call since I was working. Can someone do a big favor and please share a summary of the things discussed, especially re the projects.

Also, re the projects – I am new to FastAI – what is the expectation re student projects. Like is there one project that you get to present at the end of the course ? How many students can collaborate in one project ? Are there lists of previous years’ projects one could take a look at ?

I see there are couple of projects listed above: Source Code:Mid Level API and FastGarden. Are these projects still open for others to join ? Or should we just ask in the relevant study groups ?

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Mid Level API group would be suitable if you are already comfortable with Dl. You want to practice the skills you are learning in the class then you can try FastGarden, and all these groups are open, so you can pitch in which ever you feel comfortable.

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It’s whatever you want to do! There’s no expectation, you can collaborate with whomever. For previous years projects, look at the Share Your Work Here threads on the forum, tons of examples to look at

Re current projects: absolutely they’re open and anyone’s welcome to join! (At any point in time I’ll add)

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Thanks @akashpalrecha @radek @init_27 . I think your comments just reiterate how welcoming the fast.ai community is. I really appreciate them. It hadn’t even occurred to me that this was the first time of lot of you were video / audio meeting :slight_smile: I wondered why everyone seemed so excited to see one another! :sweat_smile: I took particular comfort from the suggestion that no-one really knows what they are doing!!!

It wasn’t my intention to suggest any reduction of any conversations on Zoom. I wouldn’t want to deprive myself or others of that. It was really interesting to listen in. Hearing about the projects and experience is really beneficial when trying to think of your own projects to tackle.

I guess I just feel it would be good to have some resource somewhere (discord, a forum thread, not sure what’s best?) to match those who want to start off fairly basic, without feeling like they’re holding the rest of the group back.

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This course is for people just getting started :slightly_smiling_face: We are hanging around these parts just because Jeremy was super kind to invite us and because simply put we still continue to learn from the discussions here (v2 is still new to many of us, including me) and I guess… we really like hanging around these parts :slight_smile: Like where else on the Internet would I go? I have no clue :smile:

Still, the message was clear - discussions on advanced topics are not helping the newer folks, so I am gonna take them elsewhere (like we have the separation on the forums, but I always feel the people just getting started do need to get the priority, that is the nature of this course :slight_smile: )

I do not know how to solve the gender imbalance issue though.

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Please feel free to use the Zoom to discuss whatever you like. The main forum is the “beginner only” space. The project room has always been somewhere that a wide variety of experience levels have been welcome, and it’s been the launch of many projects that have gone on to be highly significant. I wouldn’t want that to change!

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would you mind pointing me to the project room Zoom link? i can’t seem to find it, i must be missing something. thank you!

It’s the meeting link in the first post :slight_smile:

I’ve also edited it to make it more clear it’s a zoom link :slight_smile:

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ah, got it, it’s the forum that’s aimed primarily at beginners. thanks, for some reason i thought the zoom link was aimed at the same audience. very helpful.

I’m joining the Zoom now.

since Jeremy shared the COVID-19 paper in the call, here is a dataset that I saw on covid https://pages.semanticscholar.org/coronavirus-research

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