Open events started to take place at our offices under the scope of the Tryolabs Engineering Events. This time, it was the turn of an introductory talk about Machine Learning, which we named Machine Learning 101. The target audience were software developers who knew little to nothing about the field.

From the very beginning, we were gladly surprised by the community. A mere 2 hours after posting the event in Meetup.com we ran out of available spots! Due to this, we decided to repeat the talk in a second date. We feel we need to help spread the word about such an important topic, and reach as many people as we can.

At both events, the talks were run by Martín (Tryolabs CEO) and Alan (Tryolabs CTO).

Alan presenting key ML concepts.

Martín did a short introduction about how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are impacting the tech industry, how companies are taking advantage of these technologies and new trends of the sector. In a nutshell, the talk elaborated on Andrew Ng's concept that "AI is the new electricity".

After Martín's introduction, Alan was in charge of presenting the technical introduction to Machine Learning concepts. As a summary, he explained what Machine Learning is, why we use Python and its ecosystem, the difference between supervised & unsupervised learning, how the input to algorithms is transformed to a set of features and pointed out some common problems. To demystify the ideas behind these algorithms, he showed the easy intuition behind two well-known Machine Learning algorithms: k-Nearest Neighbors and Support Vector Machines (SVM). The talk finished with a short demo on how to recognize handwritten digits using scikit-learn.

If you're interested you can checkout both presentations in the slides below:

After the talks, we enjoyed an after office with great pizza and cold beers.

We're very happy to keep engaging with the community on topics we're passionate about and surely, more events are yet to come. Stay tuned.