Namaste. 2018 is over. I want to express how grateful I am. Grateful for everyone that I had the pleasure to interact with. Grateful for everything that has happened.
Quite a while ago, I decided to turn my back on the permanent-position-concept and become a freelancer. This important decision was backed by a multi-layered manifold of reasons. The main route of reasons has been centered around one question: How can I reach more people and teach them about AI?
It is true, I had quite some fun in academia and industry. I spent almost a dozen years of my life in a permanent position. There were many reasons for that which can be summarised with „security“. Freelancing on the other hand has a lot of advantages. „Freedom“ and „range of influence“ are two. Security is there too. But a little more hidden.
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That you can book me for trainings?That I could be your mentor?
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Facts and numbers.
A personal detail. I wanted to write a small review of this year for my own personal feedback. It is always good to have a little retrospective once in a while. Why not at the end of a year? A retrospective is a very good tool for checking your goals. After some thought, I decided to share my review. With you. The year 2018 has been rock’n’roll for me… And this feels like an understatement.
- I trained around 100 people hands-on. I taught at small, medium-sized and large enterprises. All around Germany and even once in Spain. I taught at universities. Around half of the people I educated, I educated at Data Science Retreat in Berlin.
- I did three projects in Deep Learning. One project is all about Digital Signal Processing in the music industry. I learned a lot about the power of Deep Learning when it comes to processing sounds and music. The second project is Child Growth Monitor by Welthungerhilfe. It is amazing to see how Neural Nets can be applied to images and Lidar-data. And the third project is about NLP. A topic that never ceases to fascinate me and excites me because transfer learning is now close at hand.
- My official GitHub-account now has 22 repositories. With varying quality, of course. The number tells me that I managed to follow one of my passions: Implementation. And a lot of the repositories there are on-demand. Because someone requested some knowledge, I created some software.
- My official homepage has around 50 blog-articles. Another hint at another passion. Writing. Being creative. I had a lot of fun with this rewarding activity. This is something you should do often: Do something that is meaningful, fun and rewarding.
- My network on LinkedIn has 1600+ connections. I can barely remember how many exchanges I had with all those excellent people. From all around the globe. Artificial Intelligence is a topic that many people contribute to. And I always feel honoured hearing from them.
- I helped a couple of people with their personal development. Unfolding the potential that sleeps inside people is one of the most rewarding events that you can witness.
- I feel honoured that Siraj Raval appointed me dean of Würzburg School of AI.
- I gathered a lot of practical knowledge about Representation Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning. These two fields are crucial because the complement supervised learning.
- I organised 7 Meetups in Würzburg. It is a blessing that around 240 curious people attended the meetings. It is awesome that the group now has around 300 members.
- I had lots of fun working at ZDI Mainfranken. Although Würzburg is not known to be a technology hotspot (yet!), I feel that people definitely do understand the digitalisation challenge and do excellent work. I am happy to be here.
A big shout-out to all of you.
If you read this, I thank you a lot for supporting my mission. Every interaction I had with you talented people in 2018 has been very rewarding. Please allow the repetition: I feel very, very honoured. Thank you a thousandfold. I am definitely looking forward to 2019!
Stay in touch.
I hope you liked the article. Why not stay in touch? You will find me at LinkedIn, XING and Facebook. Please add me if you like and feel free to like, comment and share my humble contributions to the world of AI. Thank you!
If you want to become a part of my mission of spreading Artificial Intelligence globally, feel free to become one of my Patrons. Become a Patron!
A quick about me. I am a computer scientist with a love for art, music and yoga. I am a Artificial Intelligence expert with a focus on Deep Learning. As a freelancer I offer training, mentoring and prototyping. If you are interested in working with me, let me know. My email-address is tristan@ai-guru.de - I am looking forward to talking to you!
