ML-India: Mumbai chapter | First Meetup

ML-India is pleased to announce that it has kicked off its Mumbai chapter and the first meetup was held on 4th February 2017. The aim is to hold frequent meetups where machine learning enthusiasts can meet and discuss the latest in the field.

Big shout out to Culture Machine for helping out with the logistics, and to Sankha and Aakash who took this initiative up in Mumbai.

The meetup had around 20-25 people who joined in for the meetup. It was a mixed crowd spanning students, industry veterans and faculty members in academic institutions. Some of the participants had past experience with ML and some were looking to get their hands on ML so that they can also get initiated into the field.

They started with discussing simple basics about machine learning and concepts like supervised and unsupervised learning. After the introduction to ML, they took up the Twitter classification paper and discussed the gradient boosted decision tree at length. Folks from Culture Machine, also had interesting insights and provided some perspective of how they were using ML in their daily business and where, as a direction, the field is headed.

Click here to download the slide deck from the talk.

They concluded the meetup with a feedback session. Some participants suggested that they would like to have hands-on problem solving exercises in the future meetups to get practical exposure. They also expressed interest in exploring other active research areas that involved machine learning.

The response and feedback from the participants was very encouraging. People were thankful for starting the initiative in Mumbai, and were keen on attending future meetups. We’ll keep up with having such engaging meetups on ML, and having researchers and practitioners involved in ML to discuss their work and insights.