Getting Started with Machine Learning through AI Blitz ⚡️ Challenge
By
snehananavati
We, at AIcrowd, understand the importance of having solid ML skills and want to make sure that everyone can access high-quality AI resources with great ease. We are also a big believer of - learning by doing. Therefore, in May 2020, we started our flagship contest - AI Blitz ⚡️ a three-week-long challenge comprising five AI puzzles from various domains of machine learning. The aim of this challenge is to enable newcomers and AI enthusiasts to upskill their ML understanding by solving problems from various domains. Some of our favourite past Blitz ⚡️ challenges are Fake News Detection, Venomous Snake Classification, and Real-Time Mask Detection.
Simplifying the learning process using examples and starter codes
Getting started in AI is often seen as a daunting task. There are too many factors involved and one doesn’t always know where to start. To address this, we provide easy-to-understand example solutions. We also understand that learning is an iterative process, catalysed by confidence from small successes. With this mindset, for AI Blitz ⚡️ we have tried to remove the key mental barriers -- by having dataset, theory and models consolidated in one place. Users need only modest compute to participate and solve the puzzles. The puzzles are interesting real-world problems that can be solved using the tools provided -- ensuring that you can quickly pick up the concept and implement them. This provides the much-needed confidence to grow in a new field. For anyone who’s been wanting to learn or hone their ML skills, this is the best platform -- with customised starter codes, any participant can make their first submission in less than 10 minutes. As a learning exercise, we also run an “Explained by Community” contest wherein participants share their solutions to one problem through an interactive blog post or video with the community -- the best entry winning some exciting prizes.
Did we mention the winners get exciting prizes?
Beginners friendly collaborative ML community
We at AIcrowd take pride in how much our community values collaboration! Our guiding principle is to provide open-source and replicable ML research to all. To keep up with that spirit, all of our winning solutions are publicly available. You can learn more about what they did differently and build on them if you’d like. The buzzing community of AIcrowd inspires many others to contribute. We also host an End-of-Blitz ⚡️ webinar that features various top participants discussing their approach to problem-solving. With past winners and participants discussing their approach on our Discord, you can share your ideas with ML enthusiasts from across the globe.
Hear what some of our past participants have to say about their Blitz ⚡️ experience
On being asked what the highlight of Blitz was, Gaetan Ramet, first runners up on our Blitz-1 leaderboard said the following, “I especially liked the diversity of the challenges. The fact that Blitz is composed of 5 different challenges that are very diverse in terms of what they require and what type of model you can apply or what type of data you are dealing with. So this is very interesting and poses a challenging problem. You deal with diverse data and solve a lot of different problems in a short time this way.”
Anchit and Pulkit, part of the Hard Drive Corrupted team that came third, felt the competition’s heat, “... towards the end, both of us were really scared as the team on 4th and 5th position were catching up and we weren’t making any improvements. I think the last 2 days were really thrilling because we were training models, again and again, to see if there is any improvement that we can do or something like that. I think that was the highlight and it really gave us a lot of joy whenever we improved our score and saw our rank on the leaderboard go up.
Nischal Shrestha, one of the winners of our Explained by Community challenge said, “I really like the idea of making the winning solution open source. By doing so, It really helps beginners like me to understand how does an expert approaches a machine-learning task. These challenges reward us for things we like to do!”
It’s getting bigger and better with every round!
Over the last 3 Blitz ⚡️, we have seen over 1000 participants from 40 countries. With over 15 real-world AI puzzles, we have witnessed around 8000 submissions. If you were always waiting for the right excuse to get started with AI, we present you the perfect opportunity!
Sign up for the upcoming Blitz⚡️ and join thousands of other individuals learning and excelling at Machine Learning.
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