AI Labs Joint Program
inzva & Koç University KUIS AI Report
On December 28, inzva completed its first-ever joint program with an AI lab, a 7-week collaboration uniting inzva and Koç University KUIS AI, with 24 graduates from 15 different universities.
Our goal to democratize AI knowledge for all talented students no matter where they reside and study is coming to alive thanks to these newly established partnerships with the forthcoming AI labs in Turkey.
Though we held a very strict application process with 3 challenging questions that evaluate the participants skills carefully, we were happy to meet with many talented participants coming from different backgrounds and currently at different stages of their AI journey including those who are working towards obtaining their PhD as well as those participating various years of their graduate and undergraduate studies.
The first batch of productive and thriving journey we took was based on the course led by an outstanding researcher, Fatma Güney, named “Computer Vision for Autonomous Driving”, usually open to senior and graduate students at Koç University and was accompanied by 5 talented and experienced guides attending both from Turkey and abroad — Atakan Güney, Batuhan Koyuncu, Dilara Gökay, Evin Pınar Örnek, and Uras Mutlu.
Fatma Güney / Lead Instructor
Even though meetings were fully virtual for health and safety reasons, the talented guides of our program provided 24 enthusiastic participants with a real-life lab session experience through the notebooks they had prepared.
The language of the discussions was English as this program was also inzva’s first international AI program that welcomed non-Turkish speaking participants from abroad.
The program offered 6 topics that are covered in the course and participants learned all about;
Object detection,
Visual object tracking,
Multi-object tracking,
Semantic segmentation,
Instance segmentation.
7 weeks of the active study period was designed to have the participants study designated materials beforehand, solve each week’s notebooks by themselves and come in Saturdays to discuss the course videos with Fatma Güney as well as going through the notebooks together with the guides to fully grasp the details of the tasks of that week.
Now, these notebooks are open source and can be found on inzva Github repository.
The first joint program was a very effective and fruitful experience thanks to the devoted guidance of Fatma Güney, the talented guides and, active and dedicated participants.
Considering how much we love diversity and sharing knowledge, not to even mention the success of this first program, we plan to carry out more of such programs together with various universities and AI labs in the future.
The second batch is set to start around late-July and will be held together with Gökberk Cinbiş from the METU ImageLab and focus on a very hot topic, generative adversarial models, most commonly referred as GANs!
A BEV Foundation project inzva is a non-profit hacker community organizing study and project groups as well as camps in the fields of AI and Algorithm; and gathering CS students, academics, and professionals in Turkey.
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