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Sir Gzowski Statue >> Ontario Place >> Skcook Restuarant >> Sir Gzowski Statue

Join the hike at 10:30, or at the restaurant at 12

 (check slack for more real time arrival time at the restaurant) 

If we have to wait for you at the starting point of the hike, you will be fined $1 for every minute. we will keep these in a piggy bank (e-transfered to Amir) and will use it to buy everyone some dessert

Lakeshore hike + Nigerian food

Explainable Information Retrieval (XIR)

Join the hike at 10, or at the restaurant at 12

100 mins before lunch, 80 minutes after (or take public transit to go back)

 (there seems to be street parking available too) |  

Riverdale / bayview + Syrian food

Founders of all levels and others will gather at Kaaveh's place for pitch practice and feedback before Collision.

Each founder will have an opportunity to practice their 2-minute pitch followed by tear-down/feedback from others.

We will order pizza and provide refreshments.  BYOB

Street parking is available on Government Road and some nearby streets

Collision Pitch Practice and Pizza (at Kaaveh's)

https://maps.app.goo.gl/JkneD7SybQ9gcXWF7

, seeing as collision after dark is already there

Eh List / Collision mixer

, if you're a member already and post in "founders' hike" channel)

picnic for ML and other tech folks, founders, and investors

food, drinks, water, snacks and fruits, soccer ball, volleyball, frisbee, cards, board game, blanket ... you get the idea

just meet us at the location of the pin on the map whenever you arrive

If you are planning to arrive at 10, a number of us will take the taxi from there. make sure to be there by 10 if you want to join us

Founders/ ML Peeps Picnic

Join the hike at 10, or at the restaurant at 12:30 (check 

 for more real time arrival time at the restaurant) 

 (there are closer options, but this is halfway between the start point and the restaurant) |  Closest Bike share Location (n/a)

Finch Corridor + Korean Food

***It's time to get together for a family-friendly-ish backyard BBQ at Kaaveh's house.*** We welcome Tech Founders, Investors & Others.

PLEASE RSVP SO WE HAVE THE CORRECT NUMBERS

Non-founders that likely have the ability to sleep at a decent hour and understand the difference between a weekday and a weekend. (I heard 'Others' do actually exist, but I have yet to encounter one)  If you fit this category, you are welcome. Don't be surprised if we Tech founders take pictures of you to document this phenomenon.

Your partners and kids are welcome, there will usually be a few kids there at least. There is a trampoline and a couple of other things as well for them. 

This trampoline has been scientifically proven to provide you with one beer and a half break from your kids.

We will provide food and drinks. There will be a vegetarian option as well.

Street parking is available on Government Road and some nearby streets.

 It is approx. a 20-minute walk from Royal York Subway Station.

BBQ - Tech Founders & Friends - SAT. JULY 9TH AT 1PM (Kids are welcome)

 space. when you enter the MaRS building from University, walk up the stairs in front of you and it's right on your left

Thank you for joining us for this exclusive founders/ investors/ ML peeps dinner!

6:20-7:00 pizza / refreshments + Jefferson discussion

The specific question we will talking about is: 

how will GitHub Copilot affect developers and businesses?

https://ai.science/l/5db0e899-208d-493a-a806-f51caa241eda@/assets

 before the session (or after), if you find any interesting resources send them to me (Amir) with a sentence about why they're interesting to you. I'll add those to the reading list above

 one person is randomly selected to provide their thoughts about co-pilot and its impact on tech and business; then they nominate the next person; continue until everyone has provided their thoughts

 we will have an open ended discussion about everything that is said 

We are hosting this even in partnership with Microsoft Reactor

Founders / Investors Jefferson Dinner - Business and Machine Learning

Scarborough Bluffs Trail + Eu Food (ViPei Bistro)

We are doing a city parks hike from MaRS to Casa Loma and end in Forest Hill. Very easy.

Will be doing a picnic in a park in Forest Hill. For food you can get a takeout from various diners in Forrest Hill and eat in the park. Brunch Options are Aroma Espresso, Village Juicery, What a Bagel and more

Casa Loma hike + Diner food in the park (picnic)

We would like to invite you as community leaders and friends to join us for a short session discussing the latest evolution in our community and product strategic direction. As always we rely on your feedback to make the best decisions that maximizes the value we deliver to our commnity and supporters; the rough agenda will be as follows:

Feedback Session - Strategic Direction and Product Update

Please Read the Instruction Very Carefully !!!

. We will do the most scenic trails in the park and have some sandwiches, then we will head to 

Please be on time, having no delay is very crucial for this hike, try to be at least a couple min early

If you want to join this hike make sure you do the following steps.

1- Register for this hike here as early as 

2- Arrange your ride to the park and back. (carpooling is an awesome option for this week, you can arrange carpooling through the founder's hike channel in Slack)

3- Make sure your ride gets the parking ticket in advance (tickets will be available to purchase on Monday, July 25th). Mono Cliffs Provincial Park is in very high demand and there is very limited parking space, you (or your ride) need to get the parking ticket in advance. They will not allow you to go inside the park if you don't have a parking ticket. To obtain the parking ticket please use the following link

Purchas of Daily Vehicle Permit for Mono Cliffs

*obtaining the daily Vehicle permit is your responsibility. The organizer of the event is not responsible for your ticket or acceptance of the enterance to the park 

-----Mono Cliffs is located on the picturesque Bruce Trail, with numerous hiking trails throughout the park. You will walk through a canyon on the spillway trail or past 30-meter cliffs on the cliff top trail.

5- Please, on July 30th, leave Toronto early in the morning and give yourself enough time to join your fellows in 

 on time at 9 am. if you didn't make it on time to the Starbucks, make sure to be in 

 ready for the hike before 10 am. We start the hike around 10 am.

. It is 8:44 KM and appx of 1h:42m. We will stop at some  scenic points along the way to let the people take pictures. Please make sure that you have water and sandwiches or protein bars with yourself. We will stop to have our snacks and enjoy the scenery in the middle of the hike. 

7-   After the hike, we will head toward 

. It is 55 Min drive. If we could get the parking, we would be in 

. Please check the Founders Hike channel for more live updates. 

8- There are many restaurants and fast food around the area if you need it.

9- In case you decide to leave the group, make sure to inform the organizer of the event 

10- Please bring all the items you may need for swimming. Please be respectful and considerate to your friends in the group all the time.

If we have to wait for you at the starting point of the hike, you will be fined $1 for every minute. we will keep these in a piggy bank (e-transferred to Amir) and will use it to buy everyone some dessert

Mono Cliffs Provincial Park and Wasaga Beach

someone will be on the ground floor welcoming you between 5:15 and 6. Please make sure you plan to arrive in this time window. 

Thank you for joining us for this exclusive founders/ investors/ dev peeps dinner!

note: if you are planning to bring guests, please have them register so that we have an accurate count for food 

https://ai.science/l/5a6621f7-faeb-4b1a-a071-76ce64a00a20@/assets

 one person is randomly selected to provide their thoughts about the topic and its impact on tech and business; then they nominate the next person; continue until everyone has provided their thoughts

We are hosting this even in partnership with Rideout & Maybee

Founders / Investors Dinner - Is decentralization avoidable? 

We will explore some of the mid town parks and trails and will have some middle eastern food at Jerusalem Restaurant 

Mid Town Hike + Middle Eastern Food

https://routes.rungoapp.com/route/Hl1Cmyk4H7

Hi everyone, please join us for another hike and beach day! This time we will stay closer to home, but have no fear you'll still feel like you're on vacation.

We will start the hike at Sunnyside Pavilion, on Sunnyside Beach Park. Then we will walk West towards Mimico, taking the waterfront trail across the river and towards the Humber Bay Park. 

After enjoying the scenery on the lake, we will head back towards Sunnyside, stopping for an early lunch at La Vecchia Ristorante 

. I'm hoping we can find a nice spot on their patio to enjoy some good Italian food. 

After our bellies are full and our Negroni glasses empty, we will meander back through the lovely park that leads to Sunnyside Beach. Once back, we have the option to spend the afternoon on the beach or take a dip in the pool. Stand up paddle boards and kayaks are available to rent in the area as well. 

There is a parking lot just next to the beach, near the meeting spot.

Humber Bay Park + Italian Food + Sunny Side Beach

Rosedale Subway Station - South East corner of the intersection 

This weekend we're gonna explore some more Toronto ravines.

We'll start by the Rosedale Subway station and hit the trail along the Rosedale valley road. Once we reach Castle Frank station we're gonna take a little tour of some of the most expensive real estate :) until we reach another part of the trail heading to Beaumont park. From there Yellow Creek ravine will take us north up to St. Claire. 

After the hike, we'll stop for healthy lunch at 

Beaumont Park + Mary Be Kitchen (brunch)

Davisville Station - South East corner of the intersection 

Crothers Woods + Afghani Food

Feedback Session, Community Fundraising, and Product Update

[On September 24, we will keep ourselves close to the lake as we walk along the Martin Goodman trail from Downtown all the way to Etobicoke. We will wrap up with a hearty Ukrainian lunch. This hike is a little longer than our usual hikes, but the terrain is more flat.]

Martin Goodman Trail + Ukranian Food

Once gathered at Islington, we will walk along Bloor, then along Kipling, to the entrance of Mimico Creek Trail at 43.65422100757532, -79.54110934556397. It's a back and forth trail, so we will be back at the same place. The restaurant is not far from the station.

The restaurant is a Latin-Asian fusion restaurant, and they come with vegetarian menu. 

Mimico Creek Trail + Pan Asian Food

Join this even to know about our "community round" crowdfunding campaign, and the opportunity to invest in aggregate intellect. 

CONTEXT: We have been approached by several community members since we started our fundraising campaign who wanted to participate but with smaller cheques than our min. cheque size. We have looked into our options and decided to run a campaign on FrontFundr which allows Canadian residents to invest in and share the ownership of our venture with cheques as little as $500. 

CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE INFO AND START THE INVESTMENT PROCESS HERE

WHAT IS AISC BUILDING? Aggregate Intellect is building a Self-organizing Knowledge Navigator, backed by our 10k+ global community of AI practitioners and researchers. This platform is part of an ecosystem we are building to tackle technical information overload problem, and help ML developers build products faster and better. 

JOIN THIS SESSION TO SEE A DEMO OF THE PRODUCT

6:10-6:20 Welcome and introduction by co-founders

6:40-7:10 Discussion breakouts with company staff and community members

7:10-7:30 Huddle, closing, and next steps

AISC: Community Fundraising Launch and Q&A

Lakeshore walk + Egyptian Food

Thank you for joining us for this exclusive toronto tech peeps dinner!

 If you are planning to bring guests, please have them register so that we have an accurate count

6:45-7:30 drinks / refreshments + discussion

Should DALL.E or Similar Technologies Replace Artists?

 before the session (or after), if you find any interesting resources send them to me (Amir) with a sentence about why they're interesting to you. I'll add those to a reading list

 this is a brewery and you can order food or drinks as you wish

Tech Dinner - Should DALL.E Replace Artists? 

Route 2 hours hike along the trail to see the fall colors and then head to North Restaurant for yummy Persian kebabs for recharge! 

I will have a car for those who need a ride to be picked up at Yonge and Sheppard station. 

Note car ride will be needed from park to restaurant. If you’ve got one and are joining, please let us know.

Earl Bales free parking, North Restaurant free parking

Earl's Bale Park + Persian Food

In this session we will be talking to some startup and investment veterans about questions like

 is an early-stage technology investor, and manages privately-held Fiddlehead Ventures, Toronto, Canada. His portfolio includes companies from the healthcare, foodtech, medical and scientific device, and AI sectors. He has spent over 30 years working in early stage technology investing, corporate restructuring and turnarounds.. Former restructuring practice leader at KPMG, and partner at private equity firm EVM, he was focused on distressed and opportunistic investments. He has spent over 20 years as an independent Chief Restructuring Officer in cross-border and international mandates covering almost every sector and continent. Darryl is currently an investor and advisor to 12 technology-based companies.

 is a Strategist and Venture Partner advocating for human-centred AI, education and the ethical distribution of AI in this era of transformation. As a Venture Partner at MATR Ventures, she seeks to power the underestimated founder through capital and connectivity. A current cofounder of MyData Canada, and member of the Privacy Protection Collective and former COO of Beacon Trust Network she aims to advance the quality of human-computer experiences through values-based innovation prioritizing human-centred design. Hessie is also an advisor and innovations lead at Altitude Accelerator. She is a Member of Artificial Intelligence Program Advisory Committee (PAC) at University of Fredericton, board member with Technology for Good Canada, a member of the Women in AI Ethics Collective, and a contributor/editor to Towards Data Science, GritDaily, and Forbes.

Investing in Deep Tech

[We will start near Eglinton West Subway station and walk through the ravines all the way to the east side of the Don. On the way we will pass Casa Loma, Rosedale, Riverdale and other historic Toronto neighborhoods]

Mid-town Ravines + Vietnamese Food

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT IS NOW VIRUTAL

We have been hearing a lot about MLOps and there has been a rush of new tools in that space! is all this justified?

Tech Dinner - Is the MLOps Hype Justified? 

We've spent the past 2 years helping AI developer teams build their product faster, and we've used all this information to develop our platform to enable rapid R&D product development scale. We're ready to help SMB teams building AI products revolutionize the way they collaborate and activate the technical knowledge they need to build products successfully. Join us to see how Aggregate Intellect is creating a totally new way of working. 

The A.I. Product Showcase will feature the founders of Aggregate Intellect & key champions in the AISC global Machine Learning community. You'll hear from industry experts about:

-What are the collective intelligence catalysts for the next wave of AI?

-What does the emerging landscape of tools look like?

-How to galvanize research innovations into business practice

Angel Investor Q&A and Product Showcase

Premiere: Second Brain for Technical Knowledge Management

please take note of the following carefully

 sorry for change of plans, but we're arriving in town and leaving one day earlier than originally planned, so shifting this back. hope it still works for you

my girlfriend and I will be in town briefly for holidays and would love to invite you to dinner with us at mother's dumpling. +1's are welcome and strongly encouraged.

Post -Christmas Dinner

Please note that in this session we will be discussing a major business strategy change we are considering, and as investors in a.i. we would love to hear your thoughts about the new direction.  

In this casual and friendly event we will 

[IMPORTANT TO ATTEND] A.I. Company Update, and Mastermind Group

NOTE: if you are not able to join the call, the room might be full, please come back towards the end of the hour for the nex talk. We will send you the recording afterwards. 

We will be bringing together some of the LLM experts for a day of learning and disucssion. This will be in our usual format of presentation (30 minute) followed by discussion (20 minute)

 (CEO @ Aggregate Intellect); Era of KnowledgeOps

 (ML Lead @ Voiceflow); LLM Integration Best Practices

 (Global AI Solutions Lead @ Accenture); Responsible Generative AI at Scale

 (CTO @ Nexxt Intelligence); LLMs for Agile Innovation

 (PhD Student @ CMU); Reinforced Prompt Optimization

 (CTO @ Bedrock AI); Enhancing Language Models with External Tools - Cancelled due to personal emergency (recorded video will be provided in the material)

 (MLE @ Huggingface); Navigating Enterprise Analytics with LLMs

Amir is the co-founder of Aggregate Intellect (

), a Smart Knowledge Navigator platform for R&D teams in emerging technologies like AI. Prior to this, Amir was an NLP Product Lead at Royal Bank of Canada, and held a postdoctoral position at University of Oxford conducting research on experimental quantum computing. Amir holds a PhD in Physics from University of Toronto.

 - DevOps and ModelOps have transformed software development over the past two decades, but now we are seeing a further shift left with the rise of KnowledgeOps. This new era leverages tools to augment our problem-solving, planning, and critical thinking abilities, enabling us to tackle highly complex knowledge work with greater efficiency and effectiveness. KnowledgeOps promises to enhance our ability to experiment with a wider range of ideas and select the most impactful ones, similar to the benefits seen in DevOps and related methodologies.

Denys is the ML lead at Voiceflow focused on building the ML platform and data science offerings. His focus is on realtime NLP systems that help Voiceflow’s 60+ enterprise customers build better conversational assistants. Previously he worked at large bank as a senior cloud architect.

Integrating LLMs into Your Product: Considerations and Best Practices - 

The proliferation of ChatGPT and other large language models has resulted in an explosion of LLM-based projects and startups. While these models can provide impressive initial demos, integrating them into a product requires careful consideration and planning. This talk will cover key considerations for creating, testing, and optimizing prompts for LLMs, as well as how to run analytics on key user metrics to ensure success.

Noelle Silver Russell is a multi-award-winning technologist and entrepreneur who specializes in advising companies on emerging technology, generative AI and LLMs. She is the Global AI Solutions Lead as well as the Global Industry Lead for Generative AI at Accenture. She has led teams at NPR, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon Alexa, and is a consistent champion for AI literacy and the ethical use of AI based on her work building some of the largest AI models in the world. She is the founder of AI Leadership Institute and she was recently awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for Artificial Intelligence as well as VentureBeat’s Women in AI Responsibility and Ethics award.

Generative AI: Ethics and Accessibility - 

Generative AI has made impressive advances in creating music, art, and even virtual worlds that were once thought to be exclusively the domain of human creators. However, with such power comes great responsibility, and we must be mindful of the ethical implications of our creations. In this session, we will explore the intersection of generative AI, ethics, and accessibility. We will examine ethical considerations related to bias, transparency, and ownership, as well as the challenges of making generative AI accessible to individuals with disabilities and those from underrepresented communities.

Gordon is the Senior Engineering Manager of the Applied Machine Learning team at Ada where he's helped lead the creation of Ada's ML engine and features. Gordon's background is in Engineering Physics and Operations Research, and he's passionate about building useful ML products.

Leveraging Language Models for Training Data Generation and Tool Learning - 

An emerging aspect of large language models is their ability to generate datasets that allow them to self-improve. A fascinating recent example is Toolformer (Schick et al.) in which LLMs generate fine-tuning data that helps them learn how to use tools at run-time. In this talk, we’ll examine this trend by taking a close look at the Toolformer paper and other related research.

Josh is the CTO at Nexxt Intelligence, where he leads R&D on LLMs and NLP to build innovative solutions for the market research industry. He also works in biodiversity and applications of AI for conservation.

Commercializing LLMs: Lessons and Ideas for Agile Innovation

 - In this talk, Josh, an ML expert with experience commercializing NLP-powered services, will discuss the potential for leveraging foundation models to drive agile innovation in both individual and organizational processes. He will share lessons learned from his work with a bootstrapped startup and provide insights on how LLMs can be commercialized effectively.

Mingkai Deng is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University working at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Prior to that, he was a data scientist who led award-winning projects and built analytics products that serve multiple Fortune 500 clients. 

Optimizing Large Language Models with Reinforcement Learning-Based Prompts 

- Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to perform a wide range of tasks by understanding human queries, but they are often sensitive to the wording of the prompts, which can greatly affect the output. This talk will introduce RLPrompt, an efficient algorithm that uses reinforcement learning to systematically search for the best prompts to improve LLM performance across diverse tasks.

Suhas is the CTO & Co-founder of Bedrock AI, an NLP startup operating in the financial domain, where he conducts research on LLMs, domain adaptation, text ranking, and more. He was the co-chair of the Privacy WG at BigScience, the chair at TMLS 2022 and TMLS NLP 2022 conferences, and is currently writing a book on Large Language Models.

LLMOps: Expanding the Capabilities of Language Models with External Tools

 - This talk explores how language models can be integrated with external tools, such as Python interpreters, API's, and data stores, to greatly expand their utility. We will examine the emerging field of 'LLMOps' and review some promising tools. Additionally, we will push the boundaries of what's possible by exploring how a language model could accurately answer complex questions like, "Who was the CFO at Apple when its stock price was at its lowest point in the last 10 years?"

Rajiv is a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, whose primary focus is on enabling enterprise teams to succeed with AI. He is a widely recognized speaker on enterprise AI and was part of data science teams at Snorkel AI, Caterpillar, and State Farm.

Incorporating Large Language Models into Enterprise Analytics: Navigating the Landscape of In-Context Learning and Agents

 - Large Language Models (LLMs) have dramatically changed our expectations for AI. While a few innovators are building proof-of-concept projects using APIs, most enterprise analytic teams still need to figure out how to incorporate LLMs into their analytical toolbox. Rajiv shows the necessity of understanding the growth of "in-context learning" and agents. With these insights, he explains how LLMs will shape enterprise analytics. Along the way, he covers many practical factors, such as the different providers of LLMs, resource costs, and ethical issues.

One Day Workshop on Practical LLMs

It’s Spring - let’s create! Come over, and we’ll paint whatever you feel like together. I will guide you through the pouring art technique if you’d like to join in. 0 skills needed. Just choose the colours and let it flow. 

🕙 11 am - 1 pm. We will order food after painting. 

🎨 I will buy all the supplies. If you have a specific colour in mind, let me know and I’ll get it for you. Or I might already have it :) 

🎶Special DJ set by Ash is guaranteed to get you in the mood! 

💰Please chime in $20, so I can get your  canvas, paints and food. Any leftover painting supplies $ will go towards extra pizza 😏 Kindly send a transfer here:

Paint, Eat & Vibe 🧑‍🎨🍕🎶

Subway Exit: St. Clair West, Take Heath Street Exit

Details: Join the Carl & Portia as they host fun evening of board games. Light snacks and alcohol-free beverages will be provided. BYOB & F.

Board Game Night

We will be bringing together some of the founders and developers who are building plugins and tools on top of and around LLMs to showcase their projects and inspire you to build!

This will be in our usual format of presentation (25 minute) followed by discussion (25 minute)

If you want to speak about any of these topics or similar ones, reach out to 

 (PhD Student @ McGill University); Using LangChain [includes demo | hands-on]

 (ML Lead @ Voiceflow); Running LLMs in Your Environment [includes demo]

Amir Feizpour

Events

Posts