Nairobi AI Saturdays - Book club with Stanford Videos

Last couple of Saturdays I finally got a chance to do out-of-work activities and I decided to attend the Nairobi AI Meetups in the IBM offices in the Atrium building. It is a great venue for learning and interacting with people in the community.

The meetup can sort of be described as a book club for Stanford NLP AI/DL lectures series. I have encountered 2 possible formats so far, both of them are quite hilarious in execution.

1. We watch the lecture at x2 or x1.5 speed during the session and have learning and discussions around the topic. This is somewhat limiting since we cannot ask the Stanford lecturer questions. So meetup participants ask each other.
2. We get one or two of the meetup participant to watch lectures during the week and prepare reformatted slides from the content to present the lecture as a proxy of the Stanford lecturer. While the presenter is standing in for the original, we can ask the proxy questions and clarifications and have more interactive learning. This format is more fun, but requires more prep-work and effort from a couple of people. Increasing the pool of people doing this would be great.

The last set of lectures we watched covered Tree-RNN's and Co-referene . The tree-RNN's are particularly powerfull in capturing the semantics of prose. The meetup could really use more linguists in the mix to clarify some of the linguistic features NN's can learn, this is a multi-disciplinary field after all. I will see if we can convince people from the Nairobi University Department of Linguistics to attend, the lack of recency on their website does not give me much hope.