How to get plugged into the AI community

Chris and Daniel take you on a tour of local and global AI events, and discuss how to get the most out of your experiences. From access to experts to developing new industry relationships, learn how to get your foot in the door and make connections that help you grow as an AI practitioner.

Then drawing from their own wealth of experience as speakers, they dive into what it takes to give a memorable world-class talk that your audience will love. They break down how to select the topic, write the abstract, put the presentation together, and deliver the narrative with impact!

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• strongDM – Manage access to any database, server, and environment. strongDM makes it easy for DevOps to enforce the controls InfoSec teams require. 
• Discover.bot – A digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels to learn from one another, share stories, and move the bot conversation forward. Want to learn more about building bots? Get started with their Guide to Bot Building Frameworks. 
• GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data. 

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Local Meetups - Great for first steps, local help and relationship building, job connections, involvement in local projects, etc. Mostly free! 
  • PyData
  • TensorFlow
  • PyTorch
  • Deep Learning
  • etc.
• Large industry conferences - Great to see what some of the larger companies and innovative startups are doing with AI, application and infra focused, etc. Expensive. 
  • O’Reilly AI, Strata Data, TensorFlow World
  • QCon AI, QCon
  • Spark Summit
  • MLConf
  • Applied Machine Learning Days
  • PyCon
  • LiveWorx
  • etc.
• Smaller, topical events or events focused on particular tools - Great if you are heavily invested in particular tech or a topic like NLP. In general you have to look around quite a bit to find these. 
  • TensorFlow dev summit
  • Spacy IRL
  • PyTorch developers conference
  • AllenNLP Summit
  • Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference
  • DataSciConhttps://datascicon.tech/
  • Etc.
• Research conferences - Meant to be an outlet for original research. Great to see how research orgs/institutions are pushing the boundaries and doing groundbreaking things. Hard to get into and very academic. 
  • NeurIPS
  • EMNLP
  • ICLR
  • CVPR
  • etc.

Some conference talks from the Practical AI hosts:

• Chris Benson’s upcoming talk at LiveWorx 2019 in Boston on Wednesday, June 12, 2019: Artificial Intelligence Strategy: Digital Transformation Through Deep Learning
• Examples of previous AI talks by Chris Benson
• Building GPU-Accelerated Workflows with TensorFlow and Kubernetes
• Fully Reproducible ML Deployment with Spark, Pachyderm, and MLeap

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!