Follow-up on an awesome MIIA Meetup in Cape Town!

MIIA Community,

Thanks to all who attended our first Meetup in Cape Town!

We had an awesome meetup with 45 people attending and lots of interaction and participation in the Q&A sessions and the informal discussions afterwards. I think it is fair to say that we are all very excited about the potential of Machine Intelligence & Data Science and its applications to help address some of the key problems and opportunities that we have in Africa. As promised, I’ve included the links below to the presentations, photos, and videos as well as the attendee list. If you have attended and your name does not appear on the list below, please send me an email so that we can get our records up to date.

As discussed the MIIA community’s impact and growth are in our hands and very dependent on your participation and initiatives. 

• As Slack is utilised as the MIIA community’s real-time messaging and chat environment, we would like to encourage everyone in the MIIA community to join us on Slack. If you have not received an invite to Slack, please let us know via an email to info@machineintelligenceafrica.org.
• For all members in Cape Town, we would recommend to also join us on MIIA Meetup – Cape Town  We also plan to have meetups on other parts of the continent. Let us know if you are able to help facilitate MIIA Meetups in other parts of Africa. 
• We would like to encourage the MIIA community to propose as many project ideas as possible. We welcome any application, research or technology related projects that would help solve (or at least be a step towards solving) African problems, help to build a stronger more innovative community, advance the state-of-the-art in Machine Intelligence and Data Science, accelerates and supports entrepreneurial activity, and help drive long-term inclusive and sustainable scientific, technological and socio-economic development on the continent. Please submit projects at  http://machineintelligenceafrica.org/activities/projects/ or send us an email at projects@machineintelligenceafrica.org.
• We also need community activity leaders to volunteer and help drive various activities. We anticipate various roles to be filled on a volunteer basis of which some can become full-time employment and/or contracted positions. If you are interested, please send us an email at info@machineintelligenceafrica.
• The Sponsors page outlines more details with respect to financial support and the various types of sponsoring available. Please send any sponsor-related questions or comments to us at sponsors@machineintelligenceafrica.org.

Looking forward to our ongoing interaction, activities and meetups to follow!

Thanks and best regards

Jacques

Links to the presentations on MIIA’s Google Drive (the presentations are also shared  in the #general channel on Slack):

• MIIA Meetup part 1 – Introduction to MIIA 
• MIIA Meetup part 2 – Introduction to TensorFlow

Links to photos of our MIIA Meetup in Cape Town:

• Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Machine-Intelligence-Institute-of-Africa/photos/27036099/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.888967167899323&type=1

Links to videos on MIIA’s YouTube Channel (the videos are still uploading and will be available at the links below)

• MIIA Meetup part 1 – Introduction to MIIA: https://youtu.be/URsRXpaQ-eU
• MIIA Meetup part 2 – Introduction to TensorFlow:  https://youtu.be/1ge6e8MI9z0 

MIIA Meetup – 9 June 2016 Attendees

Alex             Conway

Qobo           Dube

Ashley         Kleynhans + 1

Attie             Lotz

Charles     Copley + 1

Constantin   Sapkidis

Elna             Ludik

Gorden     Jemwa

Jacques     Ludik

James     Gaylard

Leon     van Dyk

Liam     Furman

Mari-Lise     du Preez

Christiaan    Loots

Krista     Nordin

Nii             Bruce

Rikus     van Vuuren   + 1

Russell     Kingwill

Shaun     Irwin

Simon     Streicher

Thuso     Simon

Iva             Lopes de Sarria

Ross      Purdon

Bianca     Ludik    + 1

Benjamin      + 1

Jandre      Fraser

Julian      Breytenbach

Frieda  

Jacques HO Ludik 

Simon     Cross

Michael     Schulman

Peter     Wilson

Ed                Owens

Helge       Reikeras

Alex              Shabala

Rikus      Combrinck

4+ more (for record purposes, please send your name to us if it does not appear on the list above)

Some initial feedback from attendees

• james.gaylard 
  • thanks @jacques for Cape Town meet-up last night – great to have a chance to meet some of the MIIA folks!
• jacques 
  • Thanks Jimmy! Yes, it was indeed great some of the MIIA folks. We’ll be sharing the presentation, photos, and video of the event shortly for others to see as well.
• Mari-Lise
  • Thanks, Jacques! Lots of excitement all round and some good connections made. Looking forward to taking this forward with the rest of the MIIA community.
• Ed Owens