La Paz, Machine Learning

Saturdays AI

La Paz

Learn Artificial Intelligence with us!

When: 6 July, according to the original announcement

Where: online

Programme: third machine learning edition (archive)

Registrations

Course structure:

Code2Learn

During the first half of the program you will learn the fundamentals of Machine Learning with practical programming exercises. In addition, our AI-specialized mentors will share their experiences and success stories.

Build2Learn

In the second half of the programme, you will develop AI models to address a specific problem, with support from our mentors.

Demo Day

At the end, each team will present its project at Demo Day to share its achievements and what it has learned.

Curriculum:

Neighbourhood-based methods

We will begin with the basics of machine learning and supervised learning. We will study k-nearest neighbours (k-NN) and k-d trees, and examine the Netflix case study.

Tree-based methods

We will study decision trees for classification and regression, including CHAID and CART.

Ensemble methods

We will explore ensemble methods for combining models: boosting with AdaBoost and stochastic gradient boosting, and bagging with random forests. We will assess when they can improve results.

Linear and nonlinear methods

We will complete the supervised learning section with linear regression, logistic regression, regularisation methods and support vector machines.

Dimensionality reduction

We will study dimensionality reduction techniques: unsupervised principal component analysis (PCA) and t-SNE, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), which uses class labels and is supervised.

Clustering methods

We will complete the unsupervised learning section with clustering methods: k-means, hierarchical clustering and DBSCAN.

Advanced topics

We will introduce deep learning and natural language processing.

Cloud computing for machine learning

We will learn the foundations of cloud computing and how to deploy machine learning models with Amazon Web Services.

Artificial intelligence project

In this module, you will learn to develop a project using the programme’s concepts and present it at Demo Day.

Demo Day

At the end of the programme, each team will present its project at Demo Day and share what it has learned.

Team

Fernando Silva 🇧🇴

AI Saturdays La Paz lead

Biography from the original edition: Fernando is a systems engineer with a postgraduate qualification in Artificial Intelligence from the Universidad de Chile. He has worked in AI since 2019. He began as a Python and machine learning mentor with the Centro Cultural de España and worked in banking, implementing machine learning models. At the time of this edition, he was researching reinforcement learning at the Universidad Católica de Bolivia. He won a category at the Facebook F8 hackathon in Silicon Valley in 2019. He has led communities including GDG Android Bolivia, Data Science Bolivia, PyData La Paz and Kaggle Days La Paz to broaden access to AI. At that time, he also had a computer vision startup and was an ambassador for deeplearning.ai through its Pie & AI programme, founded by Andrew Ng.

Danna Calle

Fernandez 🇧🇴

Agile methods, user experience and virtual reality

Biography from the original edition: Danna had volunteered with non-profit organisations for more than seven years. She was one of 140 people selected for the Global Entrepreneurship Summer School in Mexico and received a scholarship for a high-impact entrepreneurship programme in New York the following year. Her biography reports first prizes in both programmes for social technology projects supporting farmers and children with attention difficulties. She is the founder or co-founder of Aurorasoft, Qhali, Iris360grados and Human Design Group. She graduated in Commercial Engineering, with a minor in brand creation at the Universidad Católica, and was pursuing a master’s in digital business at the time of this edition. She shares her experience through talks on agile methods, technology, management, social entrepreneurship and gender. Her biography records five first prizes at startup weekends and hackathons. She believes in multidisciplinary teamwork and understanding people with empathy before designing solutions.

Mercè Vintró Ricart 🇪🇸

NLP data scientist

Biography from the original edition: Mercè was a senior computational linguist in Shell’s Data Science R&D team. She holds a degree in Translation and Interpreting from Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a master’s in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh. Before joining Shell, she worked as an R&D engineer in London startups, applying natural language processing (NLP) to real-world problems. She joined Shell in 2018 and led the development of NLP capabilities at its Digital Centre of Excellence. She also contributed to machine learning and deep learning projects for NLP. In her free time, she enjoys travelling, riding horses and playing the piano.

Federico dos Reis 🇦🇷

Data Scientist, Physicist

Biography from the original edition: a physicist working in data science and a machine learning engineer at Mercado Ads, Mercado Libre’s advertising platform. He previously taught at the University of Buenos Aires and was a CONICET doctoral candidate at the time of this edition.

Stanley Salvatierra Berrios 🇧🇴

Data Engineering, Data Science

Biography from the original edition: Stanley Salvatierra studied Electrical Engineering. At the time of this edition, he was CTO and co-founder of Deep Microsystems, working on computer vision and natural language processing. In 2019, MIT Technology Review named him one of its Innovators Under 35 for his computer vision work.

Original edition announcement

Original registration period: 14 June to 4 July

Original course dates: 6 July to 21 August

Monday, Tuesday and Saturday

Format: online

Schedule: Monday (21:00 – 22:00), Tuesday (18:00 – 21:00), Saturday (09:00 – 12:00) UTC – 4 (Bolivian time)

The programme included a certificate recording the training hours.

AI Saturdays La Paz Machine Learning

Download our brochure for more detailed information on our Machine Learning program.

Learn about the program in detail

Frequently asked questions and answers

Does the program include a certificate?

The programme offered a certificate recording the training hours for participants who completed the classes and presented their project at Demo Day. Ask the team about the current edition’s requirements and conditions.

Is the program only for the city of La Paz?

No. The online edition was designed for people interested in learning AI from different parts of the world. Ask the team about requirements for upcoming activities.