"Deep learning made EASY and FREE" by Daniel Armstrong

Come join us for a gentle introduction into deep learning where you will learn the basic of deep learning get the change to make your very own image classifier.

We are going to be covering the basic of Deep Learning, Machine Learning and AI, with a easy to understand walk through that will give you the chance to make your very own computer vision application.

We will be using the Fast.ai library in Python, which is easy to read and understand, python knowledge would be helpful but not required, we will walk though all the steps together. If you are new python or programing in general this is a great chance to get started with one of the most in demand languages for data science.

Why Fast.ai: Fast.ai is not only a fantastic library for deep learning it is also a totally free class that is offered at www.fast.ai (for free). They also have a very active community that you can help you if you get stuck on a concept or code issue.

The creator of fast.ai Jeremy Howard values a top down approach to learning deep learning. It is based on the Idea of "The Whole Game" by David Perkins. To give you an example you don't learn how to play baseball or or a video game by learning all the rules and techniques, you just play and you learn as you play.

If you are familiar with deep learning frameworks, fast.ai sits on top of the very popular and pythonic Pytorch library. To put it another way fast.ai is very easy to read, understand and use because it is designed to do most of the hard work for you. As you learn you can start digging into the code and may any changes that you see fit, but you don't have to.

What you need: Don't forget your computer if you want to code along with us. The best part is that training your very own image classifier can be done from most internet browsers (I would recommend chrome) using googles colab, which is an online Jupiter notebook. Feel free to check it out ahead of time at https://colab.research.google.com/¬.

Schedule: 6 PM: meet and greet, 6:30 Daniel's presentation, and there will be time after for more discussion and networking. You can show up late and leave early if you like.

Thanks to Innovation DuPage and Benedictine University for the free pop & pizza and the free meeting space.

The exact classroom is in Goodwin Hall room 415 on the fourth floor. Goodwin Hall is the rectangular building next the multi-story parking garage.