TL;DR
Will you be interested in a Nairaland thread focused on discussions around Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning techniques, with some focus on applications in Nigeria? If yes, please drop a comment below. If we get up to 10 interested persons on or before 10th December, I'll be willing to create the group's thread here on Nairaland.
Thank you.


Hi,
This thread is a survey for people with interest in AI/ML.

What we have to far / Current status
There have been some direct/indirect attempts to create/foster a community of people interested in Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Language Processing and so on) as seen in [1] and [2]. However, nothing really concrete materialized. It will be nice to have an AI community with different levels/mix of knowledge and experience (including people with little or no experience), were discussions ranging from research papers to Nigerian focused AI related projects. I will be interested in such a community.

The Survey / My Proposal
Therefore, I'm taking a survey here on Nairaland to know if people will be interested in such a community. The survey will run for 10 days (from 1st December - 10th December 2017). If we can get up to 10 interested persons (with different mix of experience/knowledge), I'll be willing to create a Nairaland thread (which will serve as a group) were such a community can start, grow and possibly thrive.

and then, the Requirements
To ensure you know what you are getting into, below is a list of requirements for interested persons
a. Interested in discussions/developments/research about modern AI systems only (see note below for description about what counts as morder AI).
b. Serious minded
c. That's all about requirement. :-)

Finally, the reason for this thread
If you are interested in such a community, please drop a comment below.

Important Points to Note
a. I'm not here to teach you about AI/ML. No, it's not a one sided thing. We all contribute and learn from each other about the current AI/ML projects/research that you're are working on. The aim is to foster a community of AI developers/researchers in Nigeria.

b. Modern AI (as opposed to classical AI which includes subjects like travelling salesman problem, breadth first search, simple puzzle solver etc.) focus on Machine/Deep Learning techniques (e.g. neural networks) being applied to areas such as computer vision tasks (e.g. image classification/localization), natural language processing tasks (e.g. language translation), speech recognition tasks (e.g. speech-to-text), control/planning tasks etc.

c. I know there exist AI/ML related forums online that bring together people from different countries (such as this reddit group [3]). However, I feel we need to do something more local to foster an AI community here in Nigeria.

d. I'll try to keep this thread in the front page of the programming section daily by so as to get enough viewers as possible.

Thank you.

Links
[1] https://www.nairaland.com/3371116/shall-discuss-artificial-neural-networks
[2] https://www.nairaland.com/4177343/revolutionizing-world-artificial-intelligence
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/

That's a wonderful idea...

Though i am not into artificial intelligence but i will love to learn.

It have been on my heart for sometime now.

I am in.

I am ready.

Hoping to understand as a beginner. Thanks

Interested

I am very much interested. I started studying ML using r about a month ago. It will be nice to be in a community of like minds.

Learner surpass Teacher

Gentleman, Shall we? Let the party begin.

Hello, I am interested in discussing and contributing. I'm currently doing a PhD in vision systems and machine learning in France plus I teach it to undergrads. I hope to have one or two things to contribute

Thanks for all the comments.
So far, we have gotten about 7 interested persons (with mixture of beginners, enthusiasts and people with experience). That's good.

Like I mentioned earlier, I'll try to keep this thread on the front page of programming section for the duration of this survey (10 days).
Thanks.

I am very interested o!!!

Interesting.
I'm in.

This is the future. I am in.

Great concept. Im working in the IOT sphere and AI/ML plays a huge role in it, so I hope to both contribute and to learn.

Thanks for all the response.

We now have more than 10 interested persons. This is good.

I'll keep the survey running (as earlier stated) till 10th December.
Hopefully, more people will indicate their interest.

Thank you all.

Am highly interested

Again, thanks for the interests shown so far.

The survey continues till December 10th 2017.
Thanks.

Eagerly waiting.

Count me in

Can you put this into work on robotics and facial recognition system?

tdayof:
Can you put this into work on robotics and facial recognition system?

Yes you can.

Chukwudaalu:
Count me in

Thanks

Am in

I'm interested .

Again, thanks for all comments so far.
The survey ends tomorrow (Sunday) by 11:59PM.

We currently have about 15 persons who have indicated their interest.

*coughs*
The day has come.

I am very much interested. I'll love to know how to write my very own KNN library from scratch. I hope someone can be able to put us through the supervised/unsupervised learning path.

EbonyMira:
I am very much interested. I'll love to know how to write my very own KNN library from scratch. I hope someone can be able to put us through the supervised/unsupervised learning path.

That's interesting...
I sure can help, but let me wait for da boss to log in.

Do you understand the concept behind KNN first of all?

EbonyMira:
I am very much interested. I'll love to know how to write my very own KNN library from scratch. I hope someone can be able to put us through the supervised/unsupervised learning path.

I hope so.

I hope after everything we build a real world project.

Lets go there. I'm higly intrested.
Please as a suggestion, could you mention all intrested persons when you start or can we use a platform like whatsapp. I just need to be duly notified on each update, thats all. Thanks alot

osarenomaspecial:
I hope after everything we build a real world project.

Well, let's see how it goes.
Additionally, different projects can be proposed by different persons (and these projects can be worked on by groups of persons in the community). Therefore, with such system, I hope everyone will have a part to play.

Anybody can put up an idea for a project on the group, with the hope that discussions are organically grown around the project and then these discussions may lead to actual implementation via collaboration by interested members of the group. From this perspective, it means that it's possible for the group to have different projects at an instance in time.