AI Corporations and Communities in Africa with Karim Beguir & Muthoni Wanyoike

On the podcast today, we have two more fascinating interviews from Melanie’s time at Deep Learning Indaba! Mark helps host this episode as we speak with Karim Beguir and Muthoni Wanyoike about their company, Instadeep, the wonderful Indaba conference, and the growing AI community in Africa.

Instadeep helps large enterprises understand how AI can benefit them. Karim stresses that it is possible to build advanced AI and machine learning programs in Africa because of the growing community of passionate developers and mentors for the new generation. Muthoni tells us about Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, a community she is heavily involved with in Nairobi. The group runs workshops and classes for AI developers and encourages volunteers to participate by sharing their knowledge and skills.

Karim Beguir

Karim Beguir helps companies get a grip on the latest AI advancements and how to implement them. A graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at NYU’s Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. This led him to co-found InstaDeep, an AI startup that was nominated at the MWC17 for the Top 20 global startup list made by PCMAG. Karim uses TensorFlow to develop Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning products. Karim is also the founder of the TensorFlow Tunis Meetup. He regularly organises educational events and workshops to share his experience with the community. Karim is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wide audience.

Muthoni Wanyoike

Muthoni Wanyoike is the team lead at Instadeep in Kenya. She is Passionate about bridging the skills gap in AI in Africa and does this by co-organizing the Nairobi Women in Machine Learning community. The community enables learning, mentorship, networking, and job opportunities for people interested in working in AI. She is experienced in research, data analytics, community and project management, and community growth hacking.

Cool things of the week

• Is there life on other planets? Google Cloud is working with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab to find out blog
• In this Codelab, you will learn about StarCraft II Learning Environment project and to train your first Deep Reinforcement Learning agent. You will also get familiar some of the concepts and frameworks to get to train a machine learning agent. site
• A new course to teach people about fairness in ML blog
• Serverless from the ground up: Building a simple microservice with Cloud Functions (Part 1) blog
• Superposition Podcast from Deep Learning Indaba with Omoju Miller and Nando de Freitas tweet and video

Interview

• Instadeep site
• Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science site
• Neural Information Processing Systems site
• Google Launchpad Accelerator site
• TensorFlow site
• Google Assistant site
• Cloud AutoML site
• Hackathon Lagos site
• Deep Learning Book book
• Ranked Reward: Enabling Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization research paper
• Lessons learned on building a tech community blog
• Kenya Open Data Initiative site
• R for Data Science GitHub site and book
• TWIML Presents Deep Learning Indaba site

Question of the week

If I want to create a GKE cluster with a specific major kubernetes version (or even just the latest) using the command line tools, how do I do that?

• GCloud container clusters create site
• Specifying cluster version site

Where can you find us next?

Our guests will be at Indaba 2019 in Kenya.

Mark will be at KubeCon in December.

Melanie will be at SOCML in November.