Hello everyone! A bunch of us in the meetup have been interested in deep learning for some time. Come join us this Thursday in a discussion surrounding Lesson 1 of Fast AI. We’ve just started watching the first lesson this week, so it’s not too late to catch up!

Fast AI’s new 2020 iteration of Deep Learning for Coders Part 1 has been released last month, and we plan to go through the whole 8 lessons together. We’ll be watching the videos and going through the notebooks on our own time while discussing the Questionnaire over Slack or via meetups.

Here’s the video for Lesson 1: https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=1

The Notes provide an overview of what is covered and the main takeaways of each lesson are listed under Questionnaire. (If you don’t see the Notes, click on the list icon in the top right corner of page.)

Our agenda will be:
1. 30 minutes — Open Session (any topics welcome for discussion)
2. 1 hour — Discussion on Lesson 1 of Fast AI

A note on Fast AI: The instructors take the “top-down approach” to learning, meaning that they might cover at a high level what something is or show how something in their library works — but don’t worry about understanding each line of code at that point! After the high level, they will go over details as the lesson progresses. And they’ll go into further details in future lessons. They carefully crafted the Questionnaire under the Notes section so that those should be our main takeaways from each lesson.

Here are 3 of many ways you can access their notebooks:
1. Their notebooks are available on Colab here (this is the preferred way with minimal setup): https://course.fast.ai/start_colab
2. They’ve also released a book as part of the course and version 2 of their fastai library. Their book is available for purchase or you can read it for free here: https://github.com/fastai/fastbook
3. Here are all the notebooks on GitHub, without the extra text from the book: https://github.com/fastai/course-v4

You can read more about the course here: https://course.fast.ai/

Please come and join us even if you’re new to Python. We’ll all help each other along the way!

Lastly, from the words of one of our inspirational meetup members, Christine: “As I’m watching the first fast.ai video, I’m realizing I should tell you that the whole idea of fast.ai is for people like Jeremy (he runs the course) who is a philosophy major, or me, who’s a creative writing major, to use deep learning to solve problems like figuring out if there’s a bird in an image, without having any mathematical or scientific backgrounds. So definitely this is not a super-techie course and is meant for people without computer science etc backgrounds. However, there is some Python, but it is done in these kind of pretty HTML notebooks (Jupyter notebooks), and really to solve an entire problem with the fast.ai Python library, it’s usually like 10-20 lines of code, max.”