In-person meetup: AI Tinkerers Ottawa v2.1.0 (Neurosymbolic AI & RunPod.io)
Join us for our upcoming event featuring two guest speakers and technical demonstrations, all centered around artificial intelligence.
First, we’re thrilled to welcome Jean-Michael Desrosiers, the Vice President of Marketing at RunPod. RunPod provides unparalleled access to high-performance GPUs tailored for AI applications.
Next we have Jen Schellinck, one of AI Tinkerers Ottawa’s co-organizers, CEO of Sysabee, and Adjunct Professor at Carleton University. Jen will discuss Neurosymbolic architectures, which seek to combine good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) and neural network approaches: recent successes like Google’s AlphaGeometry suggest this could be a winning strategy. In this talk, she’ll discuss some of the ideas behind neurosymbolic architectures and make some suggestions for hands-on tinkering in the space.
We’ll also be welcoming two technical demos from Vlad Florian and Alexander Polev. Vlad will showcase ImpactAI, a platform he built that enables users to build custom chatbots with no programming experience required. Alexander will discuss a Telegram bot he created that automatically summarizes YouTube videos. (Contact us if you would like to demo at a future event)
That’s not all—mark your calendar for our inaugural AI challenge! Running from March to May, this will be the perfect opportunity for you to put your skills to the test against the rest of Ottawa’s AI talent. Participants will be tasked with fine-tuning an AI model to perform text classification for a particular task, and the team with the highest accuracy wins!
This month’s meetup is hosted by Eric Fillion (founder @ Vennify.ai / author of Happy Transformer)
Schedule
6:00-6:15: Introduction
6:30-6:55: Jean-Michael Desrosiers
6:55-7:00: AI Challenge announcement
7:30-7:55: Jen Schellinck
7:55-9:00: Networking and demos
Sponsors
Who are AI Tinkerers?
Our chapter welcomes developers of all backgrounds. If you’re passionate about the technicalities behind developing AI systems, this is a home for you. Our promise is to provide a stage for open-source AI developers to share code and the lessons they’ve learned from experimentation.
Keep yourself up-to-date
Join our Discord
If you’d like to speak at our events
Please reach out to any of us on Discord or LinkedIn (you can find our links embedded on our names)
AI Tinkerers Ottawa organizers:
Hai Nghiem: Founder @ Cats with Bats
Eric Fillion: author of Happy Transformer
Greg Meldrum: Principal Developer @ Solace
Abror Kamalov: Co-founder @ DreamLinked
Rami Alhamad: Founder @ Push / UWaterloo ‘08
Jen Schellinck: Cognitive Science @ CarletonU CEO @ Sysabee AI Guides
IMPORTANT: 🗓️ Subscribe here to know when the next meetup will happen 🗓️
Previous meetups
Hai giving the introduction to the January 2024 event
Eric Fillion presenting Happy Transformer, an open-source library that he authored to help with fine-tuning transformer models.
Yacine (@yacineMTB on X) discussing his AI startup called DingBoard which provides an AI powered image editing web platform.
Greg giving a workshop on running open-source LLMs in Google Colab.
Food and beverages are often sponsored by our partners (in this case, Invest Ottawa)