What is AI NI Academy?
If you are new to AI NI, this is the questions that is hot in your head, well let me help you out. AI NI Academy is a new initiative stemming from Artificial Intelligence Northern Ireland driven by a passion for educating the AI community. Our workshops are designed to be accessible for any experience levels, whether you’re just getting started out or have been in the industry for years. AI NI Academy will teach the fundamentals behind Machine Learning and AI using collaborative tools, understandable language and various technology stacks to highlight the multiple ways to implement Machine Learning. Sounds cool, right?
Well, What Happened?
Visitors from afar, battling WI-FI, challenging concepts and a high quality teaching. Jake Young and Chloe Thompson took on the hosting / teaching roles for this workshop, with the intention of getting the attendees up and running with AI using everybody’s favourite beginners tool – Scikit Learn (which also happens to be very powerful). Slides / Live coding were used as the teaching tools to touch on the fundamental principles driving AI in the image domain.
Additionally the mentors walked the attendees through the series of common logical steps in every Machine Learning project, ranging from data preparation, data analysis, model selection and results evaluation. With an awareness of these skills it leaves all attendees in a good to appreciate the sequence of steps they need to perform when faced with an AI task.
teaching AI at this scale as a hands on workshop has not been attempted before in Northern Ireland, fitting one hundred people into a room for a difficult session is one of the AI NI’s biggest accomplishments. The second academy session is currently in planning, expect it to be better than ever upon our return in the new year!
