Google Talks About AI

My First Time Going To Google!

My friends and I were sitting on the stage after the talk was over.

Introduction about the talk

The name of the talk is Understanding Computer Vision with AI using TensorFlow, which is conducted on 11th May 2019 in Google Singapore. This talk introduced various platforms that I can do Artificial Intelligence online, explains what is AI, neural networks, how to train the neural network and convolution network. The technology they use is TensorFlow. TensorFlow is an open-source software library that allows developers to use it to build machine learning applications such as neural networks.

Why this talk?

It is rare to meet someone who is willing to teach......

Firstly, machine learning is the talk of the town in the world of technology, and it has endless potential in it. I also heard many of its uses and applications such as Siri, Google Assistant and facial recognition. Since it is so useful and popular, I decided to attend this talk to gain an extra knowledge of AI, hoping to build an AI myself in the future. I figured that if I master this skill, it can be applied to my school projects, or even in my job when I graduated.

Secondly, it is also an excellent opportunity to up-skill myself. Ever since I entered the school of Infocomm Technology, I want to explore more about technology. And there is a great opportunity to learn one of the trendiest technology just in front of me, do you think I would want to miss this opportunity? Besides, such learning opportunities are rare. You don't always meet people who are willing to share their knowledge or teach you what they know. especially people from the industry. Therefore, when experts are willing to teach, I feel that we should cherish this opportunity and learn as much as we can from them.

Lastly, it allows me to network with the industrial workers there. Most people there are workers from the industry, thus getting to know them or talking to them allows me to gain a better understanding of what the IT industry is like. This is my first time attending such as talk, thus I was very nervous and didn't talk much at all. Fortunately, my friends there knew how to network with them and I gladly tagged along with them and listened to their conversation.

Usefulness

Concept but no practical........

Sure, it is very useful. I have learnt a lot about machine learning and deep learning. I also learnt a lot about neural networks and its training process such as backpropagation. I learnt about computer vision and its object recognition ability. But these are all concepts. I know the gist of how it works and I know what tools I can use, but it is still insufficient to allow me to build an AI. Therefore, there is a Part 2 to it. A couple of months after this talk ended, our school Special Interest Group(SIG) decided to conduct a 3-days Machine Learning Boot Camp, which is purely hosted by the student leaders in that SIG. They are very experienced in both machine learning and deep learning, thus I went there to learn how to do machine learning and deep learning. In the boot camp, they explained the theory behind it, and I felt very fortunate that I had attended this talk before coming for that boot camp. If not for this talk, I wouldn't be able to understand so quickly during the boot camp, and it deepens my understanding of machine learning and deep learning as well. Although this is not related to this talk, what I am trying to say is that it is because of this talk that I have attended that allowed me to learn more quickly in the boot camp. Therefore, my takeaway from this experience is that sometimes it is good to relearn what you have already learnt to further deepen your understanding on a particular concept, especially when you did not learn thoroughly enough.

Conclusion

More talks perhaps?

In conclusion, this talk is extremely useful as it introduced machine learning and deep learning concepts to me and in my opinion, in terms of theory, it has covered more than SIG boot camp that I previously mentioned. I hope that there will be more talks like this in the future that can be this enriching.