How DID YOU GET INTO machine learning?
My first encounter with programming was in primary school using VBA inside MS Office. I was hooked and used that to learn how to program. From there I always wanted to get into Computer Science and Mathematics. My other passion is teaching, so the idea of using computers to help understand students appealed to me. Ultimately my thesis worked to develop a system that helps monitor the affective state of students using Computer Vision. Modern CV is fundamentally connected to Machine Learning, and that was the bridge for me getting into the field.
WhAT WILL YOU Be teaching?
I’ll be speaking about Recurrent Neural Networks with Stephan Gouws, where we’ll be looking at ways to incorporate memory to handle temporal information and sequences in Neural Networks.
What topics in machine learning excite you most at the moment?
My primary interest is in using Machine Learning and Computer Vision to support education and teaching endeavours. Using ML to visually understand how an audience is reacting to a speaker can help improve the quality of presentations and assist lecturers and presenters to better connect with their audience.