JHB - Reflecting on the Deep Learning Indaba + Reinforcement Learning & Friends

We've got two great talks, a lean coffee discussion given enough interest and time, pizza, and drinks. Please ensure that your RSVP is accurate!

Intro
News in AI, and info about the AI ZA community.
By Rishal Hurbans (https://twitter.com/RishalHurbans)

Reflections on the Deep Learning Indaba 2018
The Deep Learning Indaba is an annual event that focuses on building an strengthening the African AI and Machine Learning community. I was lucky enough to attend this year’s edition held in Stellenbosch in September. I’ll be going through what the event was all about, why I wanted to go and why you might want to next time, my personal takeaways, and the cool research I learned about from the presenters and other attendees.
By Amrit Purshotam (https://twitter.com/amrit_za)

Reinforcement learning (and friends)
In this day and age advancements in artificial intelligence have become more public. However, when learning of AI feats, most programmers tend to ask the same question: “But how does that work?”.
In this talk I visit some simple concepts within the AI space and talk about how we can combine them to create something amazing like a little bot that can figure out how to play a simple game.
By Rohan Chhipa (https://twitter.com/RohanChhipa)

About the Presenters
Amrit: Amrit is currently a Data Scientist and Software Engineer at Entelect. Since 2015, he’s been building software mainly in the financial and investments sector and worked across the full software development lifecycle. Since 2018, however, he returned back to his roots and passion for machine learning. He has an MSc in Computer Science specialising in Computer Vision which he completed in 2014. While his models are training, you can find him listening to the latest EDM, running, or eating his favourite pizza.

Rohan: Rohan is currently a software engineer employed at Entelect. In addition to being employed he is also a part-time student at the University of Pretoria where he intends to further his knowledge of Artificial Intelligence. In his spare time, he enjoys competing in algorithmic programming challenges such as the Google Code Jam as well as playing around with AI algorithms.