4kings:
Sad... This thread was promising.
Life happens. oops.
Watsup with SoftEng?

4kings and all
I apologise for my absence (Yes, life happens ).
I have been mostly busy with different things.

Meanwhile, there are communities that have been very active in the AI space.
Data Science Nigeria and AI saturday Lagos have been really doing well. AI saturday abuja also have some activities.
Also an AI event called IndabaXNigeria will be happening in Univeristy of Lagos in May.

I'm not sure whether I can be as active on this thread as I used to be. However, this should NOT dissuade the purpose of the thread. At bare minimum, if anyone needs help or has a question, I can assist.

Thanks 4kings, you've been very helpful and you have been a good friend on this thread.

Judini:
Hello Guys, I hope to apply for the msc scholarship this year. What do I need to know about the application process, the CBT and also the school I'm applying to asks for my sponsors details can I give them Nddc's?

In terms of specifying a sponsor for your application, you can specify NDDC. However, there should be a way in the application form to specify that the award has not been obtained. If there are no such measures in place on the application form, then I advise you don't specify NDDC, and if possible skip that section.

All the best.

Hi omohayek and Darivie04,

Thank you both for your contributions.
Please no need to argue over trivial issues. Please let's move on, and not go sideways.
I have not read through all comments/replies between both of you. However, I don't think it necessary and looking into who said what.

Anyone interested in Aritificial Intelligence / Machine Learning in Nigeria is very much welcomed here. We should look towards building and learning from each other (and not the other way around).

While we are at it about Reinforcement Learning (RL), a short Intro to RL video was published recently on youtube. I found the link on reddit on today (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgvyzIkgxF0).

Thanks all.

Darivie04:
Ive been learning algos under supervised learning but I'm also really curious about reinforcement learning, does anyone here have experience with that?

Hi Darivie04,

Welcome to the group. We (especially me) have been largely inactive for a while. However, the discussions on the thread serves as good reference and it's nice you read through it.

Now, with respect to Reinforcement Learning (RL), I'm no expert, but I have shared links to very good learning resources in the past (look through pages of the thread). Additionally, let RL people in this group (whether expert or beginner), please share you knowledge.

I'll encourage you to participate in Kaggle Competitions. It's a good way to learn.

Lastly, I'll say what you have done so far is good work. Keep pushing. We need more young people across the country to develop interest in AI. Just a suggestion: If possible, please try to get more of your friends involved in AI. Additionally, if we can have a proper arrangement with your school, it may be possible for someone within this group (that resides within your region) to give a talk at your school to create more awareness about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Thanks all.

P.S.:
I think this is enough reason to let the group discussion continue here and not on messaging platforms. It allows the group to be easily discoverable.

4kings:
Hey guys i got to know about this Nokia Bells Lab Research Competition.



Currently 25 days till deadline for registration from today.

And the research lab has won over 10 nobel prize winners for different innovations since inception so they're pretty cool.

Link: https://www.bell-labs.com/prize/

Categories for research include:

Thanks 4kings

Hello all,

More Machine Learning Challenges currently ongoing:

1. iNaturalist Challenge
An Image Classification challenge with fine-grain image classes (i.e. the various classes of image are similar). The challenge is part of the FGVC5 workshop at CVPR2018 (a Computer Vision conference). It is hosted by Google Research, iNaturalist and VisiPedia on Kaggle. More information can be found in the links below.

Links
Kaggle Link: https://www.kaggle.com/c/inaturalist-2018
Google Research Blogpost: https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-inaturalist-2018-challenge.html
Competition Website: https://sites.google.com/view/fgvc5/competitions/inaturalist

2. AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC)
The aim of the challenge is to push the frontiers of reasoning in AI / ML systems. The task is to build and train a Question Answering AI system that can answer (United States) [i]grade-school level, multiple-choice science questions[i]. The competition is organised by Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)

Links
Competition Website: http://data.allenai.org/arc/
Media Publication about competition: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610521/ai-assistants-dont-have-the-common-sense-to-avoid-talking-gibberish/

zamie:


Thanks SoftEng

I'm currently trying out TensorFlow Lite. It seems promising. I've not delved into ios development yet and I'm also not planning to work with Deeplearn js yet (hate Javascript).

Thanks again, TensorFlow Lite is awesome.

Alright.
All the best with your project.

Geniusist:


Let me get your mail so we can talk better.

Geniusist,

My apologies. I forgot to reply this message.
I have not started work on any challenge. For the past 2 months (even till now), I've had a busy schedule as stated in my earlier comment.

This reply is meant to acknowledge/reply to your earlier comment which should have been done earlier. My apologies.

P.S.
Better late than never.

oluwaseungbless:
plz add me up 08160457776

Welcome oluwaseungbless
We hold our discussions here on Nairaland. We don't use any messaging app group chat.

4kings:

Couldn't participate in the competition also, i was very busy. (Got the data though, noticed some null values when i did my analysis, i just vex postpone am )

---

I've been researching on some existing compression techniques.
Dynamic markov compression has been interesting so far.

Maybe we should lighten up the group by solving some existing compression algorithms starting with simple JPEG lossy compression and so on, maybe an idea could spark up from someone here.

... noticed some null values when i did my analysis, i just vex postpone am ...
Yeah. In fact, the last row (example) in the CSV file was NULL throughout.

I've been researching on some existing compression techniques
Nice

...starting with simple JPEG lossy compression and so on...
I'm still kind of busy sha, but this would be nice. I suggest it should be thrown open for all interested person in the group to tackle.

Thanks.

4kings:

Hmmm, are whatsapp groups good?
I think concepts can be well explained here in details than whatsapp.
And new members can see and be referred to existing discussions as pointed out by SoftEng.

Just that we've not been very active lately.

Yeah. Thanks for this.

We keep the group here. Open for any interested person to simply join the coversation and be part of the group.
An added benefit is the fact that the thread may show in search results for "AI/ML community in Nigeria", thus allowing more people to easily discover the thread/community.

zamie:
I need suggestions on transferring my machine learning models to the web and mobile apps. I use TensorFlow and sometimes Keras, So I deal with protobufs and HDF5 formats.

I've tried deploying with TensorFlow serving and kubernetes on docker but I hate the Remote Procedure Call concept. Any other alternative solution would be much appreciated.

I haven't dealt with protobuf. Also, I haven't deployed ML models to web/mobile apps. However, I have saved/loaded models saved in HDF5 format.

In terms of deploying to mobile apps (not web apps), I suggest you check out On-device Machine Learning. Tensorflow has on-device ML platform called Tensorflow Lite (see URL below). Tensorflow Lite is used in mobile and embedded system, but I think it's more geared towards Android devices.

I think a second On-device ML platform worth mentioning is CoreML by Apple (see URL below). I'm not 100% sure that it's On-device ML as I have not looked into it in-depth, but I guess it is. CoreML specifically targets Apple devices. It also has the feature of converting a trained model from a third-party framework (e.g. Caffe and Keras) to its own model format.

In terms of deploying ML for webapps, I have very little to contribute. I guess you always have to make a Remote call to the server were your ML model is deployed. But you can also check out DeepLearn JS to see whether you can deploy your model in the web browser (using javascript). I'm not sure if this is possible, but you can find out more about the library. I think I have also read about some interplay between Keras and Deep Learn JS but I'm not sure how it works.

Conclusion
I only have some abstract ideas about these various platforms, nothing concrete. However, I believe they can guide you in solving some of your current challenges.

Links
1. Tensorflow Lite:
https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile/tflite/

2. CoreML
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/converting_trained_models_to_core_ml

3. Deep Learn JS
https://deeplearnjs.org/

Thanks 4kings.
osarenomaspecial lum1 and the general house, please contribute to this question in order to provide more suggestions

Thanks all.

SoftEng:
Hi everyone,

I apologise for being away so long.
I've recently had very busy schedule that is still ongoing.

4kings
Well done for your help and contributions.
With respect to my earlier message about the research competition I was planning to work on, I did not continue (partly due to current busy schedule). I only read through some Google blogpost about the Learned Image Compression challenge. However, I did some work on the Data Science Nigeria kaggle challenge I earlier shared (It was my first real work outside anything that involved using strictly neural networks. In fact, it was my first real-world attempt at Machine Learning for structured data). I did not do so well.

I'll post links to some new Google challenge that is currently on Kaggle.
Regardless of my schedule, I will try to be more active here.

Lastly, for other members that earlier indicated interest in the formation of the group, please try to be active. Communities derive much more value when everyone participates.

Thanks all.

Dear all,

Below are the links to the Google challenge on Kaggle (currently ongoing)

1. Google Landmark Retrieval Challenge
Short Description: Given an image, can you find all of the same landmarks in a dataset?
Prize: $2,500
https://www.kaggle.com/c/landmark-retrieval-challenge

2. Google Landmark Recognition Challenge
Short Description: Label famous (and not-so-famous) landmarks in images
Prize: $2,500
https://www.kaggle.com/c/landmark-recognition-challenge

Have fun.
Thanks all.

raymod170:
Hello Everyone,

I know i have not contributed lately but that doesn't mean am not carrying out some analysis on some data-sets from kaggle, just that studies and clients projects have more priority these days but once i have some free time after exams would finish up some of the analysis and then upload for you all to review.

Best Regards.

Thanks.
All the best with you studies and projects.

Hi everyone,

I apologise for being away so long.
I've recently had very busy schedule that is still ongoing.

4kings
Well done for your help and contributions.
With respect to my earlier message about the research competition I was planning to work on, I did not continue (partly due to current busy schedule). I only read through some Google blogpost about the Learned Image Compression challenge. However, I did some work on the Data Science Nigeria kaggle challenge I earlier shared (It was my first real work outside anything that involved using strictly neural networks. In fact, it was my first real-world attempt at Machine Learning for structured data). I did not do so well.

I'll post links to some new Google challenge that is currently on Kaggle.
Regardless of my schedule, I will try to be more active here.

Lastly, for other members that earlier indicated interest in the formation of the group, please try to be active. Communities derive much more value when everyone participates.

Thanks all.

4kings:

Interesting challenges. Thanks for keeping us updated.
I sure would love to collaborate with you, though i will only be able to fully meet requirment 2 after the next three weeks. Got very tight schedule... Damn

I understand.
However, all the requirements are necessary.
Maybe some other time.

Thanks for your interest.

raymod170:
Feeling sad am not active here as before been really busy with academics but will be back soon

thanks for understanding

OK.
All the best with your academic work.

Following up on earlier post with regards to job adverts,

Microsoft is currently advertising for their 2018 AI Residency program (see link below). It is similar to Google AI Residency and Facebook AI Research Residency programs that was earlier posted.

The Residency program is open to BSc, MSc and PhD graduates. It is a good opportunity to learn more about AI Research and Development activites.

Program Duration: 1 Year

Application Deadline
"We encourage completed applications to be submitted by February 28, 2018, but will continue to review applications until March 30, 2018."


https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/microsoft-ai-residency-program/

Thanks.

4kings:
Hey guys, someone sent this to me.

"In need of 5 young programmers - fresh graduates who are good at code. Salary would be between 300-400k monthly
A lot of travel and travel allowances.

They would be working with a GIS company and would be traveling among Abuja, Lagos, Kaduna, Edo and Oyo. Trainings in Germany and UAE"

Send cvs to tijani.nwadei@gmail.com"

I don't think this job is genuine. I should have commented about it earlier. I'm sorry.

This advert is old. I think it earlier appeared in March 2017 (see link below). Apart from being old it may also be fake. A company willing to pay 300-400k for a fresh graduate coder (which is a bit high) should at least have a professional email for application or an application system.

Thanks for sharing 4kings. It shows you have good interest at heart for the group member here.

To all,
Moving ahead, try to validate job adverts before sharing.

Thanks.

Earlier link for the job post
https://www.nairaland.com/3707935/vacancy

SoftEng:


Hi all,

As mentioned earlier, below is a list of some current research/academic based challenges/competitions that I'm aware of:

Learned Image Compression Challenge for CVPR 2018
Summary: design/create a (machine learning) model that improves data compression.
http://www.compression.cc/
https://research.googleblog.com/2018/01/introducing-cvpr-2018-learned-image.html
Result Submission Deadline: 22nd April, 2018

Video Bandwidth Estimation Challenge for ICME 2018
Summary: design/create a (machine learning) model that can estimate bandwidth of streaming videos.
https://blog.twitch.tv/twitch-invites-you-to-take-on-the-icme-2018-grand-challenge-2b3824d3537b
Submission Deadline: 15th, Februrary 2018

NVIDIA AI City Challenge
Summary: Contains various sub-components research competitions (e.g. estimating traffic flow) mostly focused on computer vision related task.
https://www.aicitychallenge.org/
Proposal Submission Deadline: 10th January, 2018
Note: This challenge is a workshop and competition for CVPR 2018.

I'll be trying my hands on one of the challenges. I'm not yet sure which challenge I'll work on.

Anybody here interested in collaborating, please let me know. However, you have be:
1. really serious minded.
2. create time out of your busy schedule to work on the challenge.
3. ready to read research papers.
4. ready to learn quickly required background/related techniques.
5. already fluent in at least one programming language (preferably python)

Please only those who meet the above requirement should indicate interest.

Thank you.

SoftEng:
I'll put up links/descriptions of research based challenges/competitions soon.
If you're more interested in this challenge/competition category, please check back later.

Thanks.

Hi all,

As mentioned earlier, below is a list of some current research/academic based challenges/competitions that I'm aware of:

Learned Image Compression Challenge for CVPR 2018
Summary: design/create a (machine learning) model that improves data compression.
http://www.compression.cc/
https://research.googleblog.com/2018/01/introducing-cvpr-2018-learned-image.html
Result Submission Deadline: 22nd April, 2018

Video Bandwidth Estimation Challenge for ICME 2018
Summary: design/create a (machine learning) model that can estimate bandwidth of streaming videos.
https://blog.twitch.tv/twitch-invites-you-to-take-on-the-icme-2018-grand-challenge-2b3824d3537b
Submission Deadline: 15th, Februrary 2018

NVIDIA AI City Challenge
Summary: Contains various sub-components research competitions (e.g. estimating traffic flow) mostly focused on computer vision related task.
https://www.aicitychallenge.org/
Proposal Submission Deadline: 10th January, 2018
Note: This challenge is a workshop and competition for CVPR 2018.

JigsSarma:
I have Some Question about Artificial Intelligence and machine Learning like
1) It helps to securing the data from all types of malware?
2) Speed up the events by ensuring complete safety.

Hi,

For your first question, I'll say it depends on how you use Machine Learning. I can't explicitly say it helps secure your data from all types of malware. That's just false.

Your second question is not clear, so I can't comment about it.

Lastly, I will advise you do some quick google search about your questions. You might find links that answers your questions.

Thanks.

I'll put up links/descriptions of research based challenges/competitions soon.
If you're more interested in this challenge/competition category, please check back later.

Thanks.

Hi all,

Here's another competition that might be of interest to you.

Microsoft Cloud AI Research Challenge.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/microsoft-cloud-ai-research-challenge/

The Challenge
Use Microsoft AI services to develop (breakthrough) applications or embed their AI (cognitive) services into your application.
Prize: 25,000 USD Grand Prize

My take on the challenge
In simple terms, Microsoft wants to encourage more developers to use their AI platform and also discover new use cases of AI from these challenge. I believe it is a fun and interesting challenge. For anyone who will be interested, you can think of wide variety of application areas, but if you can narrow it down to application areas that solves some of our local problems that would be a good thing.

Thanks.

Geniusist:


Bro this is really nice. Are you the one who created the datasets ?

No, I did not create the dataset. It was probably done by Data Science Nigeria probably in collaboration with Telecom Companies. I read their tweet about the competition and decided to also share the information here.

Hi all,

The first Data Science Nigeria for the year has kicked off. Below is a link to the competition hosted on Kaggle. Do well to check it out if you're interested. You can learn a lot more about Machine Learning through participation in the competition.

https://www.kaggle.com/c/dsntelecomschurn2018

Thanks.

islamics:
Greetings.
Somebody might be interested in this: https://research.fb.com/programs/facebook-ai-research-residency-program/

Thanks for this.
To all, please check out the link if you're interested in AI research. There are also other industrial labs that offers similar program.

Google AI residency is one of them, however, the application deadline is now passed (08/01/2018). Open AI also offers somewhat similar residency program for 4 months duration. You can apply for this anytime of the year. Link below:

https://jobs.lever.co/openai/54ddfefe-6483-4bba-a828-11a156eae7eb

4kings:

Goodday SIr.
I've been very occupied with work and have not done or learnt much yet, hoping to get very free soon.

As for the AI saturday class, i wasn't able to attend on saturday, though i was sent the curriculum of event, and for last class they did Introduction to Linear algebra, intro to python and numpy and cloud set up, so I've not really missed much so far, apart from the cloud setup.

Next week is intro to Deep learning and CNN theory, that should be interesting.


Curriculum.

Alright.
Thanks.

Hi all,

For anyone here interested in the application of deep learning to self driving car technology, there is a free (open to everyone) course being taught at MIT this January. I believe the lecture slides & videos are made available after each class (I think videos takes slightly longer time to be published than the slides).

If you are interested, please do check it out, because I believe it will cover the latest advances in self driving car technologies, and this means it will relatively get you up to speed in this field/area.

Below is a link to the course web page
https://selfdrivingcars.mit.edu/

Thank you.

P.S.:
Maybe one day in the future, self driving cars will be introduced into Nigeria roads as well. I know this might sound unrealistic, but it's possible.

well done odizeey

4kings, how are you coming along with your YOLO studies? Also, did you manage to attend the AI saturday class yesterday (and how was it)?

Thanks.

Well done raymod170 and Samcent.

Keep up the good work.

As mentioned earlier, here's a curation of Nigerian/African/[Black] related AI/ML/DS communities or initiatives.

1. Data Science Nigeria
This is a non-profit run and managed by the Data Scientists Network Foundation. Additionally, they are also throwing academia (especially PhD students) and industry partnership into the mix.

Website: http://www.datasciencenigeria.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DataScienceNIG

In the past, they've organised bootcamps, data science competition on kaggle, and an annual summit.


2. Women In Machine Learning and Data Science (WIMLDS)
This is more of a global initiative, however, there is a Lagos chapter. The aim of the initiative is to support and promote women practicing, studying or interested in the fields machine learning and data science.

Website: [url]http://wimlds.org/[url]
Twitter: [url]https://twitter.com/wimlds[url]
Lagos Chapter Website: https://www.meetup.com/Lagos-Women-in-Machine-Learning-Data-Science/

Lastly, below are links to twitter handles of two co-organisers of the WIMLDS lagos chapter.
https://twitter.com/OluwaYettie
https://twitter.com/ruqoyyasadiq


3. ForLoopAI
The forloop team travels around Nigeria and Africa hosting talks/meetups to spread more awareness and technical knowledge of software development (mostly web and mobile applications). However, they are currently working on include AI to content of their meet up. Hence ForLoopAI. I guess they will be kickstarting serious AI related talks/meetups in 2018 (this year).

Website: http://forloop.africa/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/forLoopAI

4. AI Saturdays
I just found out about this yesterday. Just like WIMLDS, this is an international intiative. However, they now have a Lagos Chapter. The aim of the initiative is help you become really good at AI via physical training sessions. Therefore, if you more into learning from physical training sessions than online, then you should check them out. The Lagos Chapter will be meeting every saturday from 6th January, 2018 - 21st April, 2018.

Website: https://nurture.ai/ai-saturdays
Twitter (Lagos Chapter): https://twitter.com/AISaturdayLagos

5. Deep Learning Indaba
This is more research oriented and I believe the aim is to span across entire Africa. They focus on increasing African participation and contribution to the advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and address issues of diversity in these fields of science. The inaugural event was held in South Africa in September 2017, and they plan to hold it anually.

Website: http://www.deeplearningindaba.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DeepIndaba
Google Group (Mailing List & Discussions): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mlds-africa

6. Black in AI
This initiative is also an international one and also research oriented. The aim is to provide a space for sharing ideas, fostering collaborations and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of Black people in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Website: https://blackinai.github.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/black_in_ai
Google Group (Discussions): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/black-in-ai
Facebook Group: https://www./250631148730672/?ref=bookmarks


Final Note
If choose do participate in any of above groups please remember to come back and contribute to this Nairaland group here. This group may be the first point of entry to some people interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Data Science (DS) etc.

Thank you.