Welcome to the 2018 bootcamp. It will run as two-stream session with beginners’ Machine Learning class, culminating in the Finals of the InterCampus Machine Learning competition and the intermediate stream on Deep Learning concepts.

It is a five-day residential, all-expenses-paid Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp and Hackathon on emerging trends in machine learning and deep learning and will run between 10 and 14 October 2018. The intent of the bootcamp and hackathon is to build world-class capacity in advanced data analytics, upskill financial inclusion data analysts and researchers in emerging best practices, and to support the development of contextually relevant algorithm and tech innovation.

The bootcamp will include face-to-face teaching, virtual online classes, and a hands-on hackathon using the Kaggle.com platform. Distinguished data scientists from leading institutions including the Google AI Lab, Stanford AI Research, GitHub and Bankable Frontiers Associates will facilitate the sessions.  An ongoing pan-Nigeria selection competition will select the 150 best-performing students/researchers/practitioners that will be accepted into this free bootcamp. The bootcamp will also serve as the final test of the Inter-Campus Machine Learning Competition, sponsored by BlueChip Technologies as part of its 10^th anniversary celebration. Over 10,000 students from 90 universities and polytechnics participated in the preliminary phase. The bootcamp will also include a very competitive hackathon using Nigeria-centric data to explore, extrapolate and explain emerging possibilities in financial inclusion algorithms.

The bootcamp is driven by a broader strategic intent to accelerate Nigeria’s development through a solution-oriented application of machine learning in solving social/business problems and to galvanize data science knowledge revolution for employability, technology innovation and sustainable socio-economic development.

The bootcamp learning sessions will be enriched by leading experts from different parts of the world, including Matt Grasser, Director, Inclusive Fintech, Bankable Frontiers Associate, USA; Moustapha Cisse PhD, Google AI Lab; Sara Hooker, Google AI Lab; Prof Tom Dietterich, Distinguished Professor & Director Oregon State University & Founder BigML; Dr Emmanuel Doro, Principal Data Scientist, Jet.com, USA; Dr Sulaimon Afolabi, Argility South Africa; Ekow Duker, ex-Chief Analytics Officer, Barclays Africa/MD IxioAnalytics South Africa; Dr Jacques Ludik, CEO Cortex Logic, South Africa; Karim Beguir, Founder/CEO Instadeep AI, London; Omoju Miller PhD, Senior Data Scientist, GitHub, USA; Abiodun Modupe, PhD Researcher, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; Adewale Akinfaderin, Graduate Researcher, FSU & Incoming Senior Data Scientist, Lowe’s Inc., USA and Dr (Mrs) Yinka David-West, Director, Lagos Business School.

Microsoft, BlueChip Technologies, Terragon Group, AXA Mansard, FCMB, InstaDeep AI, ProShare Nigeria, The Guardian, Guardian TV, OneFi, KPMG and Zindi South Africa are the sponsors and partners of the bootcamp and summit.

Participation in the 5-day AI bootcamp is based on pre-competition qualification on the inter-campus Machine Learning page on our website. The global Machine learning competition platform, Kaggle has been used to run the two pre-qualification competitions, that is:

1. Location Optimization/Sales Forecasting and
2. Recommendation Engine.