A brand new year! Now... what lies ahead? Launching our Nexus Seminar Series!
PioneeringMinds.AI
In short, we are offering a AI seminar series throughout 2024.
Check out our website https://pioneeringminds.ai/ for more!
Looking back on 2023
2023 has been a fantastic year that will be remembered for decades to come for sure.
I was planning to write a summary.... but then again, there are literally thousands of recaps out there already! I won’t bore you with a summary of what happened in 2023… (I’ll let you in on a secret: I asked perplexity for it : D)
Through 2023 I joined tons of talks, events, conferences hosted by communities, universities and large companies.The talk by Peter Norvig on Human Centered AI (AI Business Leaders Conference hosted by The Institute for Experiential AI) really stood out for me. In gist, the talk shares that AI development should consider all potential impact on humans - the good, the bad, the obvious, all of it. AI are supposed to augment humanity, not replace it. It’s a powerful tool and in it’s development and we get to put a lot more heart and ethics into it during the process.
The Nexus Series in 2024!
Now to the business. We (Pioneering Minds AI Group) are planning something fun for all AI professionals in 2024! Dubbed “The Nexus Series”, we aim to converge the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence with the realms of Neuroscience and Global Real-world Issues!
Neuro + AI
Ever heard about neural networks? Wonder where the "neural" part comes from? You guessed right - it's the neurons in our brain! The wright brothers studied buzzards ( yes, it’s a bird) to make the first plane, and the scientist studied our brain to create the first neural network. In this track, we will explore the underpinnings of human brain and how the two domains can intersect one another!
Join us in this series to explore the frontier of neuroscience and AI!
Real-world Issue + GenAI/AI
GenAI is fantastic for UGC, all the videos from runway, pics from MidJourney are great to look at, but what can they do really? We've got series climate troubles at hand, poverty, hunger, education, violence, health... the list goes on. In this track we will explore how we can leverage GenAI to solve real world problems for humanity at large!
Join us in this series to explore the application of GenAI to make the world a better place!
Our first NeuroAI session [RSVP] !!!
Have you ever observed how baby elephants can standup minutes after birth? How baby deer can run away moments within birth on their own? Then you’d better check out this talk! RSVP here today!
Speaker: Prof.Anthony Zador, Professor, The Alle Davis and Maxine Harrison Professor of Neurosciences, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Title: Brain Wiring through the Genomic Bottleneck
Abstract: Animals are born with highly structured brain connectivity, which equips them with the ability to function well soon after birth with little or no experience. Because the wiring diagram is far too complex to be specified explicitly in the genome, it must be compressed through a “genomic bottleneck”. I will discuss theoretical and experimental results regarding the nature of the rules governing the genomic bottleneck
Prof.Zador is a leading researcher in NeuroAI, the “Catalyzing next-generation Artificial Intelligence through NeuroAI” showed a clear direction for next-gen AI What’s beyond chatgpt and LLM? Well, here we are : D
Be sure to check out Prof.Zador’s previous articles and talks at cshl!
Now, some food for thought : D
Now enough about the events, if you are reading this and have gotten this far, you must really enjoy AI : D For those of your who wants to learn more about AI, I have curated a list of books and some must-read papers for major AI Trends to get you started (on your new year resolution)!
Books & Articles & Videos
The histories, the stories the foundations
The Deep Learning Revolution by Terry Sejnowski
A must read on the history of AI development. One must know the past to understand the future : D
The Thinking Machine from the Vault of MIT
What were people thinking back in 1960s? How did shannon imagined our world would be? I was personally captivated by the sheer passion and vision they had in this video. Plus I really liked 1960s style videos : D
Leveraging AI: Engineering perspective
Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen
A must-read if you are doing ML. There is a large gap between academia and industry, and there is a lot more to consider when you are building your own company. A well thought-out and reliably built ML system will save you years down the road!
AI and Machine Learning for Coders by Laurence Moroney
To simply quote: “If you're looking to make a career move from programmer to AI specialist, this is the ideal place to start”. Well to be honest if all you want to do is jump into GenAI and tools, this is not quite for you. If you want to understand the underpinnings, work on what would be called AI infras, this is great place for you to start : D
The math, the brain and beyond
Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville
If you are trying to break into AI/ML and it’s fascinating yet befuddling core concept, this is the book for you. A brief walk through the mathematics, probabilities and all the fun stuff - it’s by no means easy compared to other books, but it’s quite intriquing.
A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins
How does our neuron work? Have you heard about action potentials? As I said before, our modern day AI is largely based on human brain and by looking at this book (if you’ve read through the previous ones) you are bound to find lots of similarities and a’ha moment. In this book Jeff Hawkins and his team shows that our brain creates thousands of models
Courses and Bootcamps
High-Dimensional Probability and Applications in Data Science
The AI/ML data are, by its nature, high dimensional. This course gives a great intro on this topic!
Google for startups: Startup School GenAI
To simply quote Exclusive live, hands-on classes showcasing Google Cloud’s latest gen AI tools and solutions, including Gemini, to help you accelerate your business’ growth”. Check out this course offered by google for startups!
Having served as mentors at GFS twice already, I know the folks here gonna deliver a fantastic course for all those who are interested!
Parting words
A year is short. Yet if you fill it with purpose, it can be much longer than you thought. 1 minute a day translates into 365 minutes a year and that’s 6 hours! Think about what you have achieved by consistently learning through the year, and what you will achieve by continuously doing this for decades to come!