At Voxel51 we are excited to announce a virtual network of 12 Meetups focused on computer vision!
Although there are already a variety of machine learning and data science Meetups, we felt that there was an untapped opportunity to establish a group of Meetups that are focused exclusively on the intersection of computer vision, open source, real world applications, and the cutting edge research happening at universities.
So, in August we started setting up the Meetups. Curiously, without any promotion on our part, confirmed speakers or dates, the Meetups have managed to organically draw 1,100+ members in a little over a month! To us, this looks like a positive signal that there currently appears to be an unmet desire for this type of content in the Meetup universe.
What topics will the Meetup focus on?
These Meetups are geared towards data scientists, machine learning engineers, and open source enthusiasts who want to expand their knowledge of computer vision and complementary technologies. We are putting an emphasis on open source software, and speakers who are computer vision practitioners or academics doing research in the field. We’ll aim to have a mix of technical topics that are approachable to both folks just getting started with computer vision, but also seasoned professionals.
Meetup locations
No need to suffer from FOMO. Join a Meetup that is most time friendly to your location so you don’t miss out on any events coming to your neck of the woods, either in-person or virtually.
Here’s the location of the 12 Meetups:
- Ann Arbor
- Austin
- Bangalore
- Boston
- Chicago
- London
- New York
- Peninsula
- San Francisco
- Seattle
- Silicon Valley
- Toronto
An exciting line up for the Nov 10 Meetup
We’ve already lined up two great speakers for the first Meetup happening on Nov 10.
Scaling Autonomous Vehicles with Computer Vision
Sri Anumakonda is an autonomous vehicle developer who has built more than 20 computer vision projects, ranging from lane detection all the way to synthetic data generation for autonomous vehicle training. Sri will be diving deep into the world of self-driving cars and explore how computer vision is used in autonomous vehicles, how companies like Tesla, Wayve.ai and Comma.ai tackle the problem, plus emerging technology and trends in this space. Buckle up, this is sure to be a great talk!
Synthetic Data Generators and Deploying Highly Accurate Retail Supply Chain Computer Vision Apps
Tarik Hammadou has been a Senior Developer Relations Manager at NVIDIA since 2019. He’s the author/co-author of over 20 journal and conference papers, and holds several patents in the area of image processing and sensors. In this talk, Tarik will present a method based on creating a digital twin of the fulfillment or a distribution center facility and generating photorealistic digital assets to train and optimize the classification model to be deployed in the real world. The performance of the training process is then used in a feedback loop to adjust the synthetic data generator until an acceptable result is achieved. Furthermore, he’ll share his deployment orchestration methodology over a large number of compute nodes.
How often will the Meetup meet?
Until we can find local co-organizers and spaces to meet at, we’ll be meeting virtually over Zoom. We are committed to hosting two (sometimes three!) diverse speakers every second Thursday of the month. Here’s the schedule for the next three Meetups:
- Nov 10, 2022 at 10 AM Pacific
- Dec 8, 2022 at 10 AM Pacific
- Jan 12, 2023 at 10 AM Pacific
Giving back
Swag is nice and a given at these types of events. But, we think we can do better. Bringing folks together every month is a great excuse to use that collective energy to put some goodness back out into the world. At every Meetup, Voxel51 will be giving attendees the opportunity to vote on one of three charities with the winning charity receiving a donation on behalf of the Meetup members.
Get involved!
This is a community-driven group of Meetups, so please consider getting involved to help make these events awesome, month after month! Reach out to Meetup co-organizer Jimmy Guerrero on Meetup.com or ping him over LinkedIn to discuss how to get you plugged in.
Consider speaking at a future Meetup
Are you working on an interesting computer vision problem at work? Are you the maintainer of an open source computer vision tool or library? If you answered “Yes” to either question, we encourage you to consider speaking at a future event!
Host a local Meetup
Do you know of a meeting space that we could use to host a local Meetup? If so, please reach out.
Become a co-organizer
Are you interested in finding local speakers, hunting down a meeting space, helping with logistics and MC-ing local events? Then consider becoming a local co-organizer.
Sponsor a local Meetup
Does your employer have a marketing or DevRel budget to help support the Meetup with administrative costs, swag giveaways and monthly charitable donations on behalf of the members? Please do not hesitate to get in touch!
A quick word from our sponsor
Voxel51 is the company behind the open source FiftyOne computer vision toolset. FiftyOne enables data science teams to improve the performance of their computer vision models by helping them curate high quality datasets, evaluate models, find mistakes, visualize embeddings, and get to production faster. They’ve made it easy to get started, in just a few minutes.
