Please RSVP in the link above.

Please read or listen to this essay prior to the event:

• Essay: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace
• Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mdVD4aGZiY

What's this Essay about?: In his essay "Machines of Loving Grace," Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, discusses how advanced AI could potentially improve several aspects of society, such as healthcare, mental health, and economic development. Amodei stresses the need for a careful balance between leveraging AI’s benefits and managing its associated risks, highlighting a vision where AI is designed primarily to support and enhance human life.

Dario Amodei is the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic. He previously served as the vice president of Research at OpenAI. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University and has contributed extensively to AI safety research.

What's an AI Discussion Group?: This is a discussion group for non-engineers focused on exploring applications of AI in business, productivity, and everyday life. Every month, we’ll listen to a podcast or read an article on our own, then meet up and discuss in small groups. Attendees should have a fundamental understanding of AI concepts like multi-agent systems, prompt engineering, natural language processing, and human-centered design. Our meetings generally follow this format: - Meet and mingle - A few rounds of small group discussions - Grab food/drink somewhere nearby

We will discuss this podcast: - Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/386-information-social-order/id733163012?i=1000672063999 - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEEmc3Qy2K0 Please listen to/watch the podcast before-hand

What's this week's podcast about? Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about his new book, Nexus, and its application to current crises. They discuss humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, democracy and dictatorship as information networks, the “naive view of information,” the advantages of fiction over truth, trust in institutions, self-correction in a democracy, truth vs. power, truth vs. order, the suicide of conservatism, fixing social media, algorithms as editorial choices, efficiency vs. inefficiency, threats to democracy, and more.

What is a Podcast Club?: It’s like a book club for podcasts. We’ll listen to a podcast episode on our own, then get together at a bar or patio and talk about it in small groups. The atmosphere is casual, low-pressure, and laid back. The idea is to enjoy some thought-provoking conversation, learn a thing or two, and have some fun.

Imagine:

Every application, service, and device understands the world you're in, learns your intentions and goals, and has the ability to extend beyond their original program......help users achieve goals faster, more efficient.

Kimera Systems is the first company to bring a network-residing, context specific infrastructure to the market.

It’s available to any developer, today.

Since Google Now and Foursquare’s added context awareness, we decided to announce what we've been working on for the last few years.

It’s based on new, mobile artificial intelligence (AI) technology. We’ve created a service that can assist your device or application in any use case.

Providing an intelligent User eXperience

Context Aware: Constantly adapting to new situations

User priorities and intent drive services

Intelligent distribution to your end-users without using current "app store"-models

Join us Wednesday August 8, 2012 from 6pm to 8pm at ShopIgniter in the Pearl District (Portland) to learn how you can implement this technology in your PHP Web Apps today, to provide a superior user experience over native apps.

We provide the necessities: Pizza, Beer, & Soda!

Limited seating: RSVP today!

A tour of robots around the world. We can also touch on the major areas of Ai and discuss what the group wants to focus on. Until we have underwriting, we are asking for donations of $5 per meeting. Depending on the venue and turn-out, non-alcoholic drinks will be provided.

This will be an introduction to Android Programming using Eclipse and Java with the Android SDK.

This is the first event in a series of Android programming talks which will inevitably lead to the production of a classic board game, such as Sorry!

All skill levels are welcome, and no prior Android Experience is necessary.

About the Speaker: Sean Walsh is the Chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery at Portland State University. Sean has extensive experience with User Interface design and undergraduate Artificial Intelligence programming. He is finishing his undergraduate degree in Computer Science, while concurrently taking graduate classes toward a Masters of Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence track.

TiE Oregon, TiE Seattle, TiE Vancouver BC and TiE Rockies are coming together to host the first-ever TiECon Northwest in Portland Oregon on January 25-26th. This 1.5 day conference will bring together entrepreneurs and investors and will highlight three disruptive technology sectors – Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Healthcare, and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality/Mixed Reality.

The possibilities seem huge and there is tremendous hype, full of great buzzwords and slogans but for investors and entrepreneurs, key questions still exist regarding these technologies:

What is the value? How can such value be unlocked? Is now the right time? What are the specific approaches, applications and markets that these technologies can be utilized in? What do these sectors need in order to continue to grow? Join us at TiECon Northwest as we bring together experts in these sectors for interactive panel discussions, keynotes, and opportunities to network with entrepreneurs and investors throughout the northwest.

PITCH NORTHWEST The conference will end with a pitch competition, Pitch Northwest!

Pitch Competition Criteria Pitch Northwest is available to pre-series A companies from all industries. The company must be headquartered in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Idaho, or British Columbia. You must have a minimal viable product, must have customer validation and are looking for funding to scale.

Prizes

The over-all winner will receive a check for $3,000 --- we are still fundraising so this purse is very likely to increase! The people's choice winner will receive a check for $1,000 - again, we are still fundraising so this purse is very likely to increase! THE DEADLINE TO SUBMIT APPLICATIONS IS FRIDAY DECEMBER 30TH

Application details can be found at www.tieconnorthwest.org

You're invited to the TECHFLUENCE: Portland - May Meetup with presentations from:

• Max Folley (Creative Technology Lead, W+K)

• Grant Thomas (Creative Technology Lead, W+K)

• Toby Roberts (President/COO, Happy Finish)

• Jerry Michalski (Strategy Director, Ziba Design & Founder of REX)

• Moderated by Todd Greco (Interaction Design Director, Ziba)

Join us as we dive into the conversation and become informed, educated, and inspired by the state of Artificial Intelligence.

Doors at 5:30pm, show starts promptly at 6pm. Pizza & drinks to follow.

Join Nike Digital for the Nike Tech Talks on June 6th! Riva-Melissa Tez, Managing Partner at Permutation Ventures and a 2017 recipient of the Forbes 30 under 30 for Finance, will be joining us to give a talk titled, What You Actually Need to Know about the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Enjoy some food and drinks while networking before and after the talk!

About the Talk: Artificial intelligence is everywhere. How will it affect us as people, companies and as a species? This talk will explore the current progress of AI, where it came from and where it's going.

About Riva: Riva is a managing partner at Permutation Ventures, an early stage VC fund focused on applied machine learning companies. She has held teaching positions at the DAB and HTW Business Schools and has guest-lectured at Oxford, Birkbeck, and Stanford. Riva writes about artificial intelligence, finance, and philosophy and represented AI in a 2016 Microsoft campaign for The Economist and was a 2017 recipient of Forbes 30 under 30 for finance.

Abstract: Recent progress in AI and machine learning is stimulating interest in applying AI in high stakes applications such as self-driving cars, surgical robots, and autonomous weapons systems. These applications require high levels of software assurance and resilience, but virtually all AI research has focused on raw performance without paying attention to questions of robustness and resilience.

In this talk, I will survey AI research that aims to create robust systems. I will consider both robustness to “known unknowns” and robustness to “unknown unknowns” — that is, to unmodeled aspects of the environment.

One technology that is relevant to creating robust AI systems is anomaly detection. In the second part of the talk, I will survey the work at Oregon State on anomaly detection. I’ll discuss our recent research on applying anomaly detection to problems of fraud detection and equipment diagnosis and discuss methods for explaining anomaly alarms to an analyst and incorporating analyst feedback into the anomaly detection process.

Bio: Dr. Tom Dietterich (AB Oberlin College 1977; MS University of Illinois 1979; PhD Stanford University 1984) is Professor Emeritus and Director of Intelligent Systems Research in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, where he joined the faculty in 1985. Dietterich has devoted his career to machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has authored more than 180 publications and two books. His research is motivated by challenging real world problems ranging from personal information management, to drug design, to sustainability, and most recently to problems in safe and robust artificial intelligence. Dietterich has also devoted many years of service to the research community. He is Past President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and he previously served as President of AAAI (2014-16) and as the founding president of the International Machine Learning Society (2001-08). Other major roles include Executive Editor of the journal Machine Learning (1992-98), co-founder of the Journal for Machine Learning Research (2000), and program chair of AAAI 1990 and NIPS 2000. He is currently the moderator for machine learning on arXiv. Dietterich is a Fellow of the ACM, AAAS, and AAAI.

Hello from Garrett Broughton.

Michael Wild is sharing his WiPy Python hardware device this week. Find out more about it here: https://docs.pycom.io/wipy/wipy/general.html#upgrading-the-firmware-over-the-air

If time permits, we'll also cover the beginning of our group Kaggle competition.

Join us for a special evening with Daniel Wilson, author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as seven other books.

Daniel, who earned a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Masters degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics will be reading from his most recent novel, The Clockwork Dynasty.

After the reading, Daniel will be joined by Todd Greco, Ziba’s Director of Interactive Design, in a conversation exploring where science, technology and design overlap, and the future of machines. We look forward to audience engagement in this conversation. Daniel will be available for a book signing following the speaking program.

The Clockwork Dynasty imagines a history in which humanlike court automatons secretly served the great empires of antiquity. Centuries later, the same machines are running out of power. As the modern-day survivors cannibalize each other for energy, a human scientist will risk her life to find the origin of the machine race, and the key to saving it.

Doors at 5:30pm, show starts promptly at 6pm. Pizza & drinks to follow.

This group is meant as a round table for anyone interested in conversational/intelligent agents (chatbots) whether voice or text driven. Feel free to bring your questions no matter how basic, technical, academic or business or design related.

We'll get together and talk about the group, what we want from it and what we are working on and interested in doing.

I'll give an overview of basic voice agent (Alex / Google home) development as I see and understand it designed to get us sharing information.

Let me know if you are interested in presenting something or leading a discussion.

Afterwards some of us will go to a local bar/restaurant to continue the conversation.

Join MapR for a one-day Big Data conference focused on enterprise data. Customers, partners and technical experts share their expertise on using data to build next generation applications. Whether you are looking to leverage your data to innovate, reduce costs, or both, at Convergence we will solve data challenges together.

Breakfast and lunch will be provided for each attendee.

Come join us every Tuesday at the Tech Academy. This is an interactive and immersive instructor lead meeting. This week we will cover the basic foundations of neural networks, covering introduction to the perceptron, artificial neural networks (ANN), convolutional neural networks (CNN), recurrent neural networks (RNN), and wrap up with adversarial attacks on neural networks.

We use a digital project and whiteboard. The course is given at a comfortable pace, so that any attendee can interrupt and ask a question. No question is too small or wrong.

We ask all the attendees to be patient so that everyone attending learns at the same pace so that all attendees are at the same level at the end of the two hours.

Join Tom Hanley from Skymind for an interactive tour through DeepLearning4j (DL4J), an open source, distributed, deep learning library for Java. This presentation will focus on machine learning basics and showing how to setup a development environment so you can run some of the canonical neurel network applications like image classification and text analysis with DL4J.

To get the most out of this presentation, read through the brief https://deeplearning4j.org/quickstart tutorial so you can follow along with coding examples.

• What we'll do
We'll be watching and working through Artificial Intelligence/Deep Learning classes as a group! There are excellent free course lectures and materials online, and from January 6th 2018 to April[masked] well go through all the contents.

In order to cater to a diverse audience, there will be 3 structured sessions every Saturday – you can attend all, some or none, it’s totally up to you! If you don’t want to attend some of the sessions, throughout the day there will be open hacking on creating open-source code implementations of the top research paper pre-prints that week. Or use that time to catch-up on lectures and readings (sessions 2 and 3 have many hardcore readings by the way!) while discussing with peers.

The Agenda
Session 1
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Beginner-Intermediate)
Practical Deep Learning- Fast.ai session 1

Break
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Lunch
Occasional brown bag lunch talk from an expert :)

Session 2
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (Intermediate-Advanced)
Deep Learning Theory- Stanford STAT385 course on Theories of Deep Learning

Session 3 (Intermediate-Advanced)
3:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Reinforcement Learning- UC Berkeley CS294 Deep Reinforcement Learning

This is the Portland, OR chapter of AI Saturdays https://nurture.ai/ai-saturdays

• What to bring

• Important to know

Let's get this party started! Thanks to our new strategic sponsor Skyward, PDXDrones is back in the air starting with our November meetup.

Come on down to meet others in the Drone community in Portland. Our members include everyone from hobbyists to drone CEOs. This is your opportunity to meet others in the local Drone community, show off your most recent projects, and discover what other amazing projects are lifting off here in Portland.

• What we'll do
We'll be watching and working through Artificial Intelligence/Deep Learning classes as a group! There are excellent free course lectures and materials online, and from January 6th 2018 to April[masked] we'll go through all the contents.

In order to cater to a diverse audience, there will be 3 structured sessions every Saturday – you can attend all, some or none, it’s totally up to you! If you don’t want to attend some of the sessions, throughout the day there will be open hacking on creating open-source code implementations of the top research paper pre-prints that week. Or use that time to catch-up on lectures and readings (sessions 2 and 3 have many hardcore readings by the way!) while discussing with peers.

Session 1: Fast.ai i Part 1 (v2) Lesson 2
Session 2: Stat385 Lecture 3 Readings – Overview of Deep Learning
Session 3a: UCL/Deep Mind Reinforcement Learning Lecture 2 – Intro to Reinforcement Learning

Note that Sessions 1 & 2 will begin with the 2nd lecture of their corresponding courses.

The Agenda
Session 1
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Beginner-Intermediate)
Practical Deep Learning- Fast.ai Part 1 (v2)
http://forums.fast.ai/t/welcome-to-part-1-v2/5787

Break
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Lunch
Occasional brown bag lunch talk from an expert :)

Session 2
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (Intermediate-Advanced)
Deep Learning Theory- Stanford STAT385 course on Theories of Deep Learning
https://stats385.github.io/readings
https://stats385.github.io/lecture_slides
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhWmdj1YUpdT-UwCLVRNX509hZrKqZ83V

Session 3 (Intermediate-Advanced)
3:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Reinforcement Learning- UCL/DeepMind Reinforcement Learning
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLacBNHqv7n9gp9cBMrA6oDbzz_8JqhSKo

This is the Portland, OR chapter of AI Saturdays https://nurture.ai/ai-saturdays

Inference, Deep Neural Nets, Hyper-Parameters, Sign Language and Visual Insights

Welcome to TensorFlow Northwest. It was exciting to have so many of you come out during February’s snow-mageddon. This month, we prepared a balanced agenda to have new contents, and to incrementally build on what you’ve learned. On the other hand, we built the labs in a way that will allow those who couldn’t beat the storm to catch up quickly.

Al Kari will begin with an introduction and a technology update, then he moves on to cover a key topic in TensorFlow: Saving your models so you can use them to classify new data. The discussion will cover best practices and techniques to use your trained models for inference and transfer learning.

Al is Manceps’ Co-founder and CEO (www.manceps.com) where he helps enterprise clients with their Digital Transformation and intelligent computing roadmaps.

Next, Andrew Ferlitsch will take you on a code-along adventure via Colaboratory- An Introduction to Constructing Neural Networks and Hyper-parameter Tuning.

You’ve kicked the tires with 5 digits hand signs last month. Now, we progressively build layers of a neural network for the larger dataset of the American Sign Language hand gestures including all the letters of the alphabet. We will cover a fully connected neural network, proceed to a deep neural network, and then add dropout layers to tackle overfitting. Then we wrap up with the fundamentals of hyper-parameter tuning. The lab requires a laptop with a modern browser and will be at a modest pace to provide sufficient opportunity to ask questions and share insights.

As Chief Data Scientist at Manceps, Andrew works on solving a diverse set of problems using Deep Learning and advanced analytics.

Finally, David Molina will demystify Neural Networks once and for all, visually! What does bias do in a Neural Network? Why are weights important? What happens when we select a high learning rate? How do we know how many inputs to select? How many hidden layers a model needs in order to predict accurately? How does a Neural Network work? These are questions we ask when we begin studying Machine Learning as we encounter our first Neural Network. David will explore visually what’s behind the code, and what happens inside a Neural Network when it runs.

David is an Industrial Engineer with five years corporate experience in building databases, managing and analyzing large data sets, and optimizing systems and processes. He is currently studying Machine Learning and consulting for companies in his native country of Colombia.

REMEMBER to bring your laptop

Pizza and drinks sponsored by Intel. Links to the labs will be posted shortly.

Hope you have a great time learning and networking.

This one day unconference will foster local AI and ML innovation and sustainable application development with the open exchange of information, ideas and learning.

Unlike most conferences there are no pre-planned presentations or schedules. The day is organized around fostering conversations around the topics you find most interesting and important. All participants are invited and encouraged to participate in discussions on AI and ML topics such as:

• the basics and technical aspects of AI and ML
• practical everyday uses of AI/ML
• using AI for good
• ethical considerations
• implications of general/super AI
• algorithm and modeling tips and techniques
• programming languages and libraries

There is a small fee involved so register soon for the best price.

Thanks.

Do you want to learn more about how to us Artifical Intelligence for Brain Scans?

We'll have a 30-minute demo and at the end of our session, we'll brainstorm and vote on new interesting topic ideas for upcoming presentations. The winning idea will get the innovator of the week.

Join the fun!

The PDX Startup Week panel discussion will discuss how AI and data can be used by startups. The panelists will highlight local use cases of how companies have used machine learning to support their business cases and accelerate the implementation of their business ideas.

If you are a founder or work for a startup interested in machine learning or data science, this panel discussion will provide you insights of how ML can be applied.

Each week we share a 20-minute TED-style talk with a 10 minute Q&A. We spend the second half of the session collaborating on new topic ideas. At the end of the session, we vote on the most interesting topic. The winning idea will get the innovator of the week and an opportunity to "Show and Tell".

Our group loves sharing, innovation, and inspiring others. It's extremely fun to share your passion with the community.

This is a joint meetup with TensorFlow NW and will be held at Vacasa. Check that meetup page for more information: https://www.meetup.com/TensorFlow-Northwest/events/246625002/

What interests you the most?

If you didn't make it to the TFDevSummit then you're in luck: We will bring the summit to you! A whole day of updates will be summarized for you in this session, where you get to hear what is available right now and where the technology is going next.

We are super excited to hold this joint event with the Portland Deep Learning group. In this interactive session, @alkari and @juliobarros will cover major topics and facilitate an open discussion on the latest features available in the framework.

For a bonus, @bhlmn will introduce Convolutional Neural Networks use cases in meteorology; Weather nerdery is a common phenomenon, and armed with a fresh PhD in the field, Bryan will get you thinking about CNN's potentials in Meteorology, now and in the future.

Come prepared for a dialogue and bring your questions, ideas and suggestions. There will be a quiz!

Don't miss this event.

Please register here: https://www.meetup.com/Data-Driven-PDX/events/250626939

AI & Machine Learning are delivering benefits to more organizations every day. We will explore:

Where do I start? How deep learning can be applied Best practices for getting started Decisions you need to make Proof of concept options Cloud, on-premises or hybrid? Resources available to you, and next steps We'll have beer, of course, food, networking, plus a great talk followed by Q&A featuring an AI expert from Skymind. Happy Hour starts at 5. The talk will start at 6 sharp.

Sponsors: Skymind, Pure Storage, Kovarus, Heceta Group

Speaker Biography:

Chris Nicholson CEO & Co-founder, Skymind (https://skymind.ai/)

Chris is the CEO and co-founder of Skymind, an open-source artificial intelligence company backed by Y Combinator, Ron Conway's SV Angel and Ray Lane. Chris worked as a journalist for over a decade, covering business and tech for The New York Times and Bloomberg News. He attended Deep Springs College, holds a degree in economics, and lives in the Bay Area.

Skymind is the leading open-source AI company, creator of Deeplearning4j and the Skymind Intelligence Layer (SKIL), an enterprise distribution for machine learning. It is Red Hat for AI, building machine-learning solutions for the Fortune 2000. Skymind supports companies applying AI to business problems that range from fraud detection to healthcare solutions to smart robots.

ML4ALL is a two day conference​ focusing on machine learning, to be held in Portland, Oregon on May 27-29, 2018.

The goal of the ML4ALL Conference​ is to make applied machine learning accessible to the average software developer​ or enthusiast.

We believe that machine learning should be viewed as a core competency for software developers, and will be a pervasive and essential aspect of almost all human-computer interaction in the near future.

The ML4ALL community wishes democratize machine learning​, highlighting smaller and more mundane use cases, bringing the technology out of the ivory towers​ of top tier tech companies and universities, and into the hands of everyday developers.

CHIFOO presents "Ethical Dilemmas & The Democratized Proliferation Of The State Of The Art AI" with Tapabrata Ghosh!

This talk will discuss the ethical dilemmas that arise from the economic consequences of extended deployment of artificial intelligence systems. In particular, the prospect of technological unemployment, the issues caused by it and potential solutions will be discussed. The talk will also briefly cover how open source software and decentralized education can be utilized to increase proliferation of state of the art artificial intelligence technology in a democratized manner to developers and others.

About the Speaker Tapabrata Ghosh's(@semiDL) biography will be published shortly.

CHIFOO is celebrating its 25th anniversary! Come join CHIFOO for our seventh speaker event for 2018's theme "Do the Right Thing- HCI Ethics: Where Do We Start?".

http://bit.ly/2Cjfack

This will be a hands on Python and computer vision machine learning so bring a laptop. We will be doing code alongs in a Jupyter Notebook using the Gap NLP/CV Data Engineering framework for Machine Learning. The code along will focus on a variety of ways of using the framework to get images into machine language ready data, storage/retrieval, and mini-batch generation.

Gap is a new open source project in Portland in a pre-launch stage (v0.9 - alpha). For more information on Gap, see: https://github.com/andrewferlitsch/Gap

Interested in Smart cities, emerging technologies, community and entrepreneurship?

Join us at the awesome Portland Mercado on Tuesday, August 28th at 6:30p) and learn how the City of Portland’s Smart City efforts in conjunction with emerging technologies will impact the PDX tech, entrepreneur and Latinx communities.

SPEAKERS: - Hector Dominguez, Open Data Coordinator at the City of Portland - Juan Barraza, Director of Student Innovation - Center for Entrepreneurship at Portland State University - Alan Hipólito, Director of Special Projects at Verde (verdenw.org)

In order to help us provide you a better experience, please RSVPs in advance at https://www.meetup.com/Latinx-Tech-PDX/events/253186221 See you there!!

Details
Same place, still looking for speakers. If you have anything you would like to present, let me know!

If you need parking, there's a parking deck below Safeway.

Agenda:

6:00 p.m.: Food, beverage, and networking

6:40 p.m.: Welcome message by Karl Fezer

6:45 p.m: Speaker 1: "Transfer Learning, or How to Stand on the Shoulders of Giants" - James DiPadua
7:30 p.m: Speaker 2: "Quantum Mechanics for Modeling Composite Semantic Spaces" - Connor Favreau
8:15 p.m.- 8:30: Project Ideas. Pitch your Project Ideas to this meetup group

8:30: End

Speaker 1 Details:

Abstract:

There's been a mountain of research into Deep Neural Networks' practical applications in image, audio and text processing. But these deep networks are often built on large corpuses of data (such as ImageNet or Wikipedia).

But that may not apply directly to your domain. Gathering data specific to your problem space may not only be a lengthy process but an expensive one too. That makes the business win a hard sell.

Transfer Learning can dramatically eliminate many of those problems, quickly.

In 'How to stand on the shoulders of giants,' we'll discuss the research background into Transfer Learning and how to implement the process in either Keras or PyTorch. The goal is for listeners to feel comfortable with the concept and prepared to begin researching an application in their workspaces.

Bio:

James is a wanderer, tinkerer, and ponderer. Not one to be pinned down, he's more comfortable in the abstract than in the known. He embraces ambiguity with a bearhug. That's a trick of course. He bear hugs the ambiguity into little mathematical boxes and then says "Dance!" and, oh, how that ambiguity dances! James currently hangs his hat at Vacasa where he works as a Senior Data Scientist tackling a myriad of growth-objectives with engineering and machine learning.

Speaker 2 Details:

Five years ago, Word2Vec offered a leap forward for the average data scientist to perform efficient algorithms in Natural Language Processing. From a body of text, Word2Vec generates a semantic space, in which the trained word vectors are often highly associated with their meaning. The next leap, a semantic space for phrases and sentences, proves tougher both computationally and in faithfully representing a composite meaning over multiple words. Surprisingly, quantifying particle interactions a la quantum mechanics shares close mathematical similarity to quantifying the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences. In this talk, I will provide an overview of current techniques in modeling language past word vectors, as well as point out the quantum mechanical aspects of these techniques. Emphasis will be placed on the “Compositional Distributional Semantics” model for the task of identifying word ambiguity."

Are you interested in learning and sharing skills in Python, Machine Learning, or Data Science? We'll be providing a demo of our Kaggle competition each Saturday in January.

If you would like to join the discussion check us out on Zoom https://zoom.us/j/7891236789.

Do you want to learn and share your passion in a supportive community? Knowledge Mavens is an ethos of sharing, creativity, and inspiration.

Our Meetup provides an opportunity to "Show and Tell" followed by a feedback and Q&A. You'll have the opportunity to share with our channels such as Meetup, GitHub, YouTube, and Facebook to connect with more passionate people.

The second half of our session we'll collaborate on new topics. The winner wins an award for the most interesting topic and the opportunity to share in an upcoming session.

Are you interested in learning and sharing skills in Python, Machine Learning? I'll share the 100-day machine learning challenge. https://github.com/Avik-Jain/100-Days-Of-ML-Code

I am also working on a ML Tensorflow project for creating Music and Ar. Here's a short video preview https://youtu.be/4IgET8IcStw

If you would like to join the discussion check us out on Zoom https://zoom.us/j/7891236789.

Do you want to learn and share your passion in a supportive community? Knowledge Mavens is an ethos of sharing, creativity, and inspiration.

Our Meetup provides an opportunity to "Show and Tell" followed by a feedback and Q&A. You'll have the opportunity to share with our channels such as Meetup, GitHub, YouTube, and Facebook to connect with more passionate people.

The second half of our session we'll collaborate on new topics. The winner wins an award for the most interesting topic and the opportunity to share in an upcoming session.

Are you interested in seeing a demo of an AI NPU demo board? Michael Wild will be sharing his build and how he's using it for AI and Machine Learning.

If you would like to join the discussion check us out on Zoom https://zoom.us/j/7891236789.

Do you want to learn and share your passion in a supportive community? Knowledge Mavens is an ethos of sharing, creativity, and inspiration.

Our Meetup provides an opportunity to "Show and Tell" followed by a feedback and Q&A. You'll have the opportunity to share with our channels such as Meetup, GitHub, YouTube, and Facebook to connect with more passionate people.

The second half of our session we'll collaborate on new topics. The winner wins an award for the most interesting topic and the opportunity to share in an upcoming session.

Are you interested in learning Python and Machine Learning? Check us out as I'll share my learnings and most recent projects.

If you would like to join the discussion check us out on Zoom https://zoom.us/j/7891236789.

Do you want to learn and share your passion in a supportive community? Knowledge Mavens is an ethos of sharing, creativity, and inspiration.

Our Meetup provides an opportunity to "Show and Tell" followed by a feedback and Q&A. You'll have the opportunity to share with our channels such as Meetup, GitHub, YouTube, and Facebook to connect with more passionate people.

The second half of our session we'll collaborate on new topics. The winner wins an award for the most interesting topic and the opportunity to share in an upcoming session.

Check back for a rescheduled time.

Sunil Rao will be presenting his past research on SNOTEL data using the time series prediction.

Drought is a serious problem in much of the U.S., with the worst conditions across the southern and western parts of the nation. Much of irrigation and recreation facilities depend on proper forecasting of streamflow. The water supply for irrigation largely comes from rivers and creeks, whose streamflow originates from the springtime melting of winter snow. A water supply forecast is a prediction of streamflow volume that will flow past a point on a stream during a specified season, typically in the spring and summer. One of the primary sources for the data is through NRCS SNOTEL( Snow Telemetry) data (available to public as part of tax dollars at work). In this demo, we showcase one such tool (Timeseries ARIMAX model) to forecast Streamflow volume for Deschutes River Basin, OR and later compare with actual data to see how it performed.

If you would like to join the discussion check us out on Zoom https://zoom.us/j/7891236789.

Do you want to learn and share your passion in a supportive community? Knowledge Mavens is an ethos of sharing, creativity, and inspiration.

Our Meetup provides an opportunity to "Show and Tell" followed by feedback and Q&A. You'll have the opportunity to share with our channels such as Meetup, GitHub, YouTube, and Facebook to connect with more passionate people.

The second half of our session we'll collaborate on new topics. The winner wins an award for the most interesting topic and the opportunity to share in an upcoming session.

Philip Robinson will be presenting research whilst at NASA on Topic Modeling.

Topic modeling is the task of taking a collection of objects and establishing a strategy for describing these objects by common categories found across the collection. This is usually an unsupervised activity applied to a document collection and doesn't require topics to be human interpret-able. My talk introduces Latent Dirichlet Allocation, as a topic modeling strategy for a collection of topics, and discusses an implemented prototype system I developed for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. For this project, I addressed the "Matchmaker's Problem" in the context of identifying the best employee to solve a mission-critical engineering anomaly in late-stage missions. The long-form presentation can be found here https://github.com/probinso/expert-modeling-system/blob/master/decks/itds/pres.pdf

If you would like to join the discussion check us out on Zoom https://zoom.us/j/7891236789.

Do you want to learn and share your passion in a supportive community? Knowledge Mavens is an ethos of sharing, creativity, and inspiration.

Our Meetup provides an opportunity to "Show and Tell" followed by feedback and Q&A. You'll have the opportunity to share with our channels such as Meetup, GitHub, YouTube, and Facebook to connect with more passionate people.

The second half of our session we'll collaborate on new topics. The winner wins an award for the most interesting topic and the opportunity to share in an upcoming session.

Come join us for the kick-off of Dynamic Talks in Portland!

Dynamic Talks is an ongoing meetup series featuring technical talks from some of the leading experts in tech in major cities around the US. Enjoy talks about the most innovative subjects in: AI, ML, voice platforms, the Cloud and search. Every event is free, with complimentary food and drinks.

In Portland, the topic of our first event will be “Voice Platforms, Conversational Commerce and NLU”. The speakers for this event will be Victoria Livschitz, Founder and CTO of Grid Dynamics, and Eugene Steinberg, Technical Fellow at Grid Dynamics. Come enjoy a night of technical talks and networking opportunities at CoLab Coworking Portland in Tigard. We hope to see you there!

Agenda

[6:00PM - 6:30PM]: Guests arrive, pizza and drinks are served

[6:30PM - 7:15PM]: First talk will be presented by Victoria Livschitz on “Conversational commerce: emerging architectures for smart & useful chatbots", followed by a Q&A

[7:15PM - 7:30PM]: Networking break

[7:30PM - 8:15PM]: Second talk will be presented by Eugene Steinberg on "Not your fathers search engine: deep learning applications for e-commerce search", followed by a Q&A

[8:15PM] - 9:00PM]: More networking and the event ends

Talk details:

Victoria Livschitz's talk details:

Title: "Conversational commerce: emerging architectures for smart & useful chatbots"

Abstract: Smart speakers and messaging apps are increasing in popularity due to their convenience, intuitive usage, and new user experiences. Companies are racing to develop voice interfaces and AI technologies in order to utilize smart speakers and messaging platforms as a sales channel.

We are introducing Grid Genie, a completely open source, multi-device, conversational commerce platform. With this technology, we can help you engineer a powerful platform to combine your Alexa skills, Google actions, and Facebook Messenger into a single seamless experience.

Eugene Steinberg's talk details:

Title: "Not your fathers search engine: deep learning applications for e-commerce search"

Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss how recent advancements in artificial intelligence are transforming traditional search technologies. Deep learning-based image analysis and natural language processing open exciting new horizons for search and recommendation applications across the industries. We’ll talk about how deep learning models can help conventional search engines to achieve better relevance. We will share our experience implementing innovative solutions for online retailers, finance and high tech customers.

ML4ALL is a two day conference​ focusing on machine learning, to be held in Portland, Oregon on April 28-30, 2019.

The goal of the ML4ALL Conference​ is to make applied machine learning accessible to the average software developer​ or enthusiast.

We believe that machine learning should be viewed as a core competency for software developers, and will be a pervasive and essential aspect of almost all human-computer interaction in the near future.

The ML4ALL community wishes democratize machine learning​, highlighting smaller and more mundane use cases, bringing the technology out of the ivory towers​ of top tier tech companies and universities, and into the hands of everyday developers.

In today's news, we see plenty of stories about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world. There are many potential benefits to be gained from AI, but there are also a number of concerns about how it will affect our lives moving into the future. What exactly is artificial intelligence anyway?

In 1986, the mathematician and philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota wrote, “I wonder whether or when artificial intelligence will ever crash the barrier of meaning.” Here, the phrase “barrier of meaning” refers to a belief about humans versus machines. Humans are able to “actually understand” the situations they encounter, whereas AI systems (at least current ones) do not possess such understanding. The internal representations learned by (or programmed into) AI systems do not capture the rich “meanings” that humans bring to bear in perception, language, and reasoning.

In this talk, Melanie Mitchell, a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Portland State University, will assess the state of the art of artificial intelligence in several domains and describe some of their current limitations and vulnerabilities, which can be accounted for by a lack of true understanding of the domains they work in.

Audience participation in the discussion will be encouraged, and together, we'll explore the following questions:

- To be reliable in human domains, what do AI systems actually need to “understand”?
- Which domains require human-like understanding?
- What does such understanding entail?

Join us for a great presentation and discussion about artificial intelligence! We'll have snacks, and there will be an opportunity for networking afterwards. We hope to see you there!

Schedule:

6:00 PM: Doors

6:10 PM: Introductions

6:15 PM: Presentation

Speaker bio:

Melanie Mitchell is Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, and External Professor and Member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. She attended Brown University, where she majored in mathematics and did research in astronomy, and the University of Michigan, where she received a Ph.D. in computer science, Her dissertation, in collaboration with her advisor Douglas Hofstadter, was the development of Copycat, a computer program that makes analogies. She has held faculty or professional positions at the University of Michigan, the Santa Fe Institute, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the OGI School of Science and Engineering, and Portland State University.

She is the author or editor of five books and over 80 scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her most recent book, Complexity: A Guided Tour, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press, is the winner of the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award. It was also named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009 and was long-listed for the Royal Society's 2010 book prize. Melanie originated the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Explorer online education program, which offers online courses and other educational resources related to the field of complex systems.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

We are delighted to be hosting our May meetup at Cambia Health Solutions in conjunction with Cambia's Employees Resource Group: HOLA (Home of Latinos and Allies).

We will be at the beautiful Artrium building and will be enjoying some Beverages and Food (sponsored by Cambia's HOLA group). Come meet and mingle with some of Cambia team members and find out about some of the technologies being used within Cambia Solutions as well as careers opportunities.

This is a Free event, but please RSVP at https://www.meetup.com/LatinxTechPDX/events/259793293/

AGENDA

6:30 – 7:00PM Networking (food + bar hosted by Cambia) 7:00p - 7:05PM Intro and Welcome to Latinx Tech PDX (Fabio Valentino) 7:05 – 7:15PM Welcome to Cambia & HOLA – (Dee Cruz Executive Sponsor) 7:15 – 8:00 PM 3 Lightning Talks:

Janus Platform: Developing scalable Micro (µ) Services for Healthcare SW Applications By Ariel Silverman, Software Development Engineer IV – CCS Engineering, HOLA Member

La Artesanía de Datos y Análisis/ The Craftsmanship of Data & Analysis By Alex Segarra, Digital Consumer Insights Analyst II – Cambia Artificial Intelligence Office, HOLA Member

Palanca Cultural: Soft Skills for the Latinx Technologist By Omar Amézquita, Manager of PPI Data Solutions – Provider Partnership Innovations, HOLA Co-Chair 8:00 – 8:30 PM Socialize and Closing

1621 SW 1st Ave (Next to Garden Bar on SW Market) Parking not validated, but there should be plenty of street and garage parking

👀Cambia is hiring! 👀 Find out more at: https://www.cambiahealth.com/careers

PDX ML is excited to partner with IBM's Center for Open Source Data and AI Technologies to host a night of 5-minute lightening talks under the theme, "Open Source AI for Social Good."

Maybe you are tired from wandering around OSCON all day, or maybe you're just a local looking for something to do. Join us to learn about what people are doing with AI to help humanity.

Schedule:

6:30pm: Networking (Looking for food/beverage sponsor...)

7:10pm: Opening remarks from Karl, Maureen, and Auggy

7:15pm: Lightening talks - How many is up to YOU! We can easily schedule up to 10, based on community lightening talk pitches. Submit ideas now!

8:45pm: Project Ideas. Pitch your Project Ideas to this meetup group

9pm: End

Got a lightening talk idea you want to present? Sign up now! https://forms.gle/ndt5MvHmiu7qz9P49

Please review the PDX ML Code of Conduct - https://www.meetup.com/Portland-Machine-Learning-Meetup/pages/26227692/Code_of_Conduct/

Companies and governments increasingly deploy intelligent systems to the real world. These systems—depending on the design and purpose—have the capacity to either greatly enhance the general well-being of the world or bring about some form of a science fiction dystopia.

Sean McGregor, who will speak to us via teleconference, will cover both aspects of these systems in equal measure. First, he'll share examples of leading-edge "AI for Good" research. Then, he'll guide us through some real-world harms caused by deployed AI systems as explored from the AI Incident Database now under development with the Partnership on AI. Sean will then wrap up the talk with a discussion of current opportunities and risks in the development of AI systems for the general welfare.

Join us for a great presentation and discussion! We'll have snacks, and there will be an opportunity for networking afterwards. We hope to see you there!

Speaker bio:

Sean defended his machine learning PhD at Oregon State University with research projects at the intersection of reinforcement learning and public policy. He now focuses on solving real-world problems with machine learning and visual analytics, including problems in wildfire suppression, heliophysics, and analog neural network computation.

Outside of his research, Sean serves as technical lead for the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, chair of the Partnership on AI expert group for Safety Critical AI, and member of the Fair, Transparent, and Accountable (FTA) expert group. Sean's "day job" is developing neural networks to run on analog architectures at Syntiant. Outside of his paid work, Sean co-founded the Portland TA3M, a series of workshops at major academic AI conferences on the topic of "AI for Good," and a now defunct non-profit dedicated to privacy education, the Privly Foundation.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

AWS re:Invent is coming up soon in Las Vegas December 2nd - 6th in 2019. Here's more info about the conference https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

In this Meetup, I'm planning to recap my sessions and share my interviews with other attendees. If videos and slides are available publicly in time, I'll share them as well.

Here's my current schedule 1. Finding a needle in a haystack: Use AI to transform content management 2. AWS Certification Exam Readiness: Machine Learning - Specialty 3. Get started with AWS DeepRacer 4. Build accurate training datasets with Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth 5. Build an engaging Alexa skill with Cake Walk 6. Cluster adverse events with Amazon Comprehend Medical & Amazon SageMaker 7. Deep learning applications with PyTorch, featuring Freshworks 8. Building predictive applications with IoT and machine learning

Everyone is welcome to learn or share their experiences.

Be inspired! Knowledge Mavens

IMPORTANT: In addition to the meetup, please officially register at the link below, as space will be limited!!!

https://events.withgoogle.com/portland-jingle-all-the-ai-holiday-bash-2019-hosted-by-google-cloud-for-startups-and-vacasa/

Jingle All the A.I. Holiday Party Monday, Dec 16, 2019 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM

Vacasa 850 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR 97209

Manceps, Google, and Vacasa present our first annual Jingle All The A.I. Holiday Bash. Come join us for a night of food, festivities, learning and fun. We’ll also be opening up our Stock Market Prediction Lab for your chance to Beat the Bots….and win a drone!

In addition to Portland’s community of A.I. and Machine Learning experts, we have a fascinating panel of executive guests from some of the most innovative companies in town! They will be sharing how they’re implementing machine learning at their respective companies, lessons learned and what they’re looking forward to.

Our panelists include:

• Aaron Raddon - CTO at Lytics
• Gordon Ferlitsch - CTO at AllMed Healthcare
• Scott Sutton - VP of Revenue Operations at Zoominfo/DiscoverOrg
• Adam Miller-Howard - VP of Product Strategy at Smarsh
• Eric Mann - Director of Engineering and Data Products at Vacasa

Andrew Ferlitsch from the Google Developer Relations team will also share the latest updates on how AI/ML technologies are evolving and how state-of-the-art solutions are deployed in production in 2020.

Finally, Jona Bechtolt from Portland synth-pop group, Yacht, will be giving a talk on how the band uses AI in their music. He may even give a demo...

Here’s our agenda:

• 5:30 - 6:15 - Happy hour and Stock Market Prediction Hands-On Lab Competition.
• 6:15 - 7:00 - Panel Discussion: AI in the Real World.
• 7:00 - 7:45 - Technical Presentation: ML in production.
• 7:45 - 8:30 - More cocktails and we’ll announce the winner of our Stock Market Prediction Lab.

*Drinks and Snacks will be provided. All are invited. Holiday sweaters encouraged.

Register - HERE! https://events.withgoogle.com/portland-jingle-all-the-ai-holiday-bash-2019-hosted-by-google-cloud-for-startups-and-vacasa/

Join us for an hour Zoom as Darren Sargent shares the basics of Machine Learning. Darren has a rich background of experience as a Software Developer.

We'll have a 30-minute demo followed by 20 minutes of Q&A. We'll wrap the last 10 minutes and ask for any follow-ups or if anyone else would like to share their projects.

Hope you can join us! Knowledge Mavens

If there is anything that is universally true in machine learning, it is that more data is always better. That’s why data scientists always respond to the “How much data do you need?” question with “How much data can you get?”

But sometimes you don’t have much data, because: a) It’s genuinely hard to get; or b) You haven’t been gathering it for very long and it takes time. This is a much more common circumstance than you might think. And you are not alone if you're experiencing this issue. Luckily, and not surprisingly, the machine learning community has come up with numerous approaches for dealing with it. Come sit in on an exclusive conversation with Dr. Tim Oates, professor and practitioner, who will share what appeals to intuition as to why the methods work and provide concrete examples of their application to simple problems.

We will discuss transfer learning, open source datasets and synthetic data, few shot learning, active learning, and semi-supervised learning. By the end of the evening, you should understand what all of these methods are, when they are applicable, and what kinds of results you can expect from using them.

Dr. Tim Oates is Chief Data Scientist at Synaptiq and an Oros Family Professor of Computer Science and Technology in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2001 with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and spent a year as a postdoc in the MIT AI Lab. He is an author or co-author of more than 150 peer reviewed papers in AI, ML, and data mining. Dr. Oates served as Chief Scientist for a big data startup in the contact management space, and has consulted in a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, construction, amusement parks, publishing, and social media.

If there is anything that is universally true in machine learning, it is that more data is always better. That’s why data scientists always respond to the “How much data do you need?” question with “How much data can you get?”

But sometimes you don’t have much data, because: a) It’s genuinely hard to get; or b) You haven’t been gathering it for very long and it takes time. This is a much more common circumstance than you might think. And you are not alone if you're experiencing this issue. Luckily, and not surprisingly, the machine learning community has come up with numerous approaches for dealing with it. Come sit in on an exclusive conversation with Dr. Tim Oates, professor and practitioner, who will share what appeals to intuition as to why the methods work and provide concrete examples of their application to simple problems.

We will discuss transfer learning, open source datasets and synthetic data, few shot learning, active learning, and semi-supervised learning. By the end of the evening, you should understand what all of these methods are, when they are applicable, and what kinds of results you can expect from using them.

Dr. Tim Oates is Chief Data Scientist at Synaptiq and an Oros Family Professor of Computer Science and Technology in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2001 with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and spent a year as a postdoc in the MIT AI Lab. He is an author or co-author of more than 150 peer reviewed papers in AI, ML, and data mining. Dr. Oates served as Chief Scientist for a big data startup in the contact management space, and has consulted in a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, construction, amusement parks, publishing, and social media.

Today’s economy is turning increasingly toward analytics. Organizations and businesses of all sizes have spent recent years collecting huge amounts of data. According to LinkedIn, there is a massive demand for people who can mine and interpret data. These are the data scientists.

Let’s review how to build a career in a Data Science Course.

The benefits of AI are pervasively accepted, and yet a paradox exists between AI's potential and its success: Research shows that up to 90% of AI/ML initiatives fail adoption; 70% of AI/ML models don't evolve; less than 20% of enterprise functions use AI, and 50% of CDOs fail within the first year. These staggering statistics illuminate organizations' tendency to prioritize artificial intelligence's technological challenges over context, relevancy, and experience. Mindful AI framework is designed to address these challenges and has been successfully implemented to help enterprises accelerate their AI journey with measurable outcomes.

Bio: Ahmer Inam is the Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer at Relanto, a global business process transformation and enterprise resiliency firm. Ahmer has more than 20 years of experience driving organizational transformation with intelligent digital solutions. His experience includes leadership roles at firms like Nike, PwC, and Wells Fargo. Ahmer is a member of the healthcare brain trust at XPRIZE where he is responsible for designing incentives based moonshot innovation competitions. Additionally, Ahmer serves as a Data & AI expert with International Institute for Analytics, and he is on the joint World Economic Forum and Responsible AI Institute task force that is designing the world’s first responsible AI certification program. Ahmer is also on the Forbes Technology Council and an advisor to a number of healthcare startups. Ahmer holds two masters degrees, one each in Industrial Engineering and Economics and a bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Oh, let me tell you all about this event, It's one you won't want to miss, my friend!

It's all about food and drink, you see, And how AI and ML might change the industry.

We'll have experts and innovators galore, Sharing insights like never before.

From startups to big brands, they'll be here, To talk about how technology will steer.

Imagine a world where your favorite snack, Is made by a robot, with incredible knack.

Or a drink that's crafted, just for you, With AI's help, it's not too good to be true!

So come one, come all, to this event of the year, Where we'll explore the future, without any fear.

Food and drink will never be the same, Thanks to AI and ML, it's a whole new game!

Don't miss out on this amazing chance, To learn and network and maybe even dance!

Startup food and beverage companies, unite, The future is bright, it's gonna be a delight!

RSVP PDQ FFS

AI is everywhere! And TAO is here for it! Our existing Data Community is growing to encompass AI and we hope that you will join us. Our kickoff event of 2024 will feature you, our community members, and give you time to share your thoughts, ideas, fears, challenges, and insights on AI. If you have opinions, we want to hear them! This is an opportunity to grow the community, network, and share ideas for future programming.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is currently in the news almost every day — chatbots like ChatGPT, image generators like Dall-E, and a host of other tools are now available and being put to use in a variety of ways.

While these software algorithms can potentially help us to work faster and smarter, there are many issues to consider in whether and how to implement them. Details that must be addressed include: What data is being used to train the language models? Who owns the source data and the outputs that are generated? How accurate are the models? How much human oversight of the model-building process is there? And what are the potential harms when things go wrong?

These algorithms are already being used to make decisions about people’s lives, like whether a person gets a job or a bank loan and how much time a person convicted of a crime might spend in jail, but students in particular are having their lives and actions analyzed more and more every day. For instance, proctoring software tries to determine whether students are cheating on exams, other software looks for plagiarism in student essays and reports, and there’s even software that analyzes emotions and/or physical objects — Is the student happy or angry? Are they holding a cellphone or a gun?

This month, leaders from Encode Justice Oregon — Maansi Singh, Sahana Srinivasan, and Julianne Huang — will join us to share their experiences and their work on drafting policy recommendations for use of AI in schools. They’ll speak about their concerns and how they think these technologies should be used in educational settings. They'll also discuss the upcoming Youth Citizens Assembly, which will give students an opportunity to add their voices to the digital privacy conversation and pitch their own ideas.

Come join us, and bring your questions and thoughts about AI in schools!

Please RSVP via the Meetup link or by sending an email to [email protected].

Speaker bios:

Encode Justice is a global coalition of youth activists fighting for justice and accountability in the digital age. Oregon’s chapter, Encode Justice Oregon, works to educate their school, local and statewide communities about algorithmic fairness while supporting legislation that encourages the safe and effective implementation of new technologies. From working with the Oregon DOJ's Consumer Privacy Task Force to engaging in connections with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Smart City PDX, PDX Privacy, and Rose Haven, Encode Justice Oregon has established a statewide presence centered around furthering the digital privacy and equitable technology movement.

Maansi Singh is a senior at Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Encode Justice Oregon Chapter. Maansi has participated in discussions surrounding the role of youth advocacy in AI ethics with organizations such as the United Nations, Washington Post, Google, ACLU, Meta and the World Economic Forum. Maansi believes that intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of new questions surrounding AI are ontological components of the ongoing discussion about human rights. Through Encode Justice and other efforts, she has pursued the intersection between computer science, ethics, policy and education.

Sahana Srinivasan is a sophomore at Jesuit High School. She is the Director of Education for Encode Justice Oregon. She is especially interested in the intersection of AI in medicine. AI ethics is important to her because in the medical field, it is critical that AI systems are both accurate, reliable, and without bias.

Julianne Huang serves as the Co-Director of Research for Encode Justice’s Oregon Chapter. Her position allows her to bring a youth voice into the AI Ethics conversation and inspires her to continue being an advocate for people like her who have grown up in a tech-centered world. Outside of EJ, she is a math and science enthusiast who enjoys participating in dance and choir.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

​​OVF is excited to kick off the first PDX AI Demo Night to showcase the AI products coming from the founder and engineering community through lightening demos + Q&A. ​

​Join us for an evening of networking and excitement, as we revel in the latest AI demos from:

​Hello Wonder DXM Paxton Reclaim

​Agenda: ​​​​​6:00-6:30pm: Welcome & mingle ​​​​​6:30-7:15pm: AI Demos ​​​​​7:15-8:00pm: Food & drinks

​Please make sure to register, as we have limited capacity - seats will fill quickly!

​We're gathering at Kiln - a beautiful new co-working space on SE Hawthorne.

Last month, we heard about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in our educational system, but these technologies are also being incorporated into many other commercial and social enterprises that impact our daily lives, including the fields of medicine, journalism, finance, human resources, law enforcement, and transportation, just to name a few.

While AI technologies may be beneficial to society, how do we know that the systems being developed are trustworthy and that they actually do what their creators claim? Can developers explain how their AI systems work and demonstrate that the outputs they generate are not biased? How might governments regulate these systems? Should companies be allowed to regulate themselves? How might governments and companies work together to ensure fairness and understandability of what the systems are doing?

Last year, World Privacy Forum, a privacy-focused research nonprofit, studied various AI governance tools currently in use around the world. They recently published their findings via a report that was co-authored by Pam Dixon, executive director of World Privacy Forum, and Kate Kaye, deputy director of the organization: https://www.worldprivacyforum.org/2023/12/new-report-risky-analysis-assessing-and-improving-ai-governance-tools/

At this month's meeting, World Privacy Forum’s Kate Kaye will join us to share the details of their research methodologies and what they learned about how governments are overseeing the implementation of AI in their countries. She'll give an overview of what AI is and what it does, and she'll also present some examples of both effective and ineffective approaches to good governance of these systems.

Bring your questions and thoughts about AI governance, and come join the discussion!

Please RSVP via this Meetup page or by sending an email to [email protected].

Speaker bio:

Kate Kaye is a Portland resident and deputy director of World Privacy Forum, a nonpartisan public-interest research nonprofit. Her research focuses on the implications of AI, digital identity and health data ecosystems, data governance, and other issues related to data collection, use and privacy.

Before joining World Privacy Forum, Kate worked for more than 20 years as an award-winning journalist covering data, emerging technology and the impact of tech on people and society. Her reporting has been seen and heard in MIT Technology Review, NPR, Protocol, Bloomberg CityLab, OneZero, WSJ, Fast Company, and other media outlets.

Kate is the founder of tech and AI ethics reporting website RedTailMedia.org. RedTail has been home to some of her work investigating algorithmic and surveillance tech policy and use in Portland including Banned in PDX, a podcast series about Portland’s facial recognition ban, and an investigation of the city’s collapsed partnership with Google-sibling Replica, a location and mobility tracking company. Kate is the author of the 2009 book on digital voter data use, Campaign ’08: A turning point for digital media.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

Starting a virtual weekly chat to talk about AI. Super rough agenda is cool insights, demo live code if ya want, and any challenges you'd like help on. Agenda is totally open to suggestions, I by no means need to control this thing at all. I've also invited the startups that are part of Bend Startup Central so we can get some cool Oregon synergy vibes.

This council is established by Governor Kotek's Executive Order 23-26 to recommend an action plan to guide awareness, education, and usage of artificial intelligence in state government that aligns with the state's policies, goals and values and support public servants to deliver customer service more efficiently and effectively. This is a governor ordered council.

Are you feeling the buzz around AI but struggling to find clear guidance on using or building AI tools and systems safely and ethically, while taking advantage of the power of AI? What best practices are organizations adopting now around the ethics and safety of AI? What questions should you be asking? What should you do now to prepare for possible laws and regulations?

The TAO AI & Data Community invites you to join us for an informal, conversational panel discussion that aims to foster AI literacy and spark dialogue about AI's emerging role in all kinds of organizations.

Over the past year, ChatGPT and the technology that powers it, Generative AI, have been making waves in our workplaces. Generative AI is already having an impact inside companies and in our jobs. In this talk, we'll make sense of generative AI in a jargon-free environment. Learn how generative AI works, what it does well, and what it doesn't do well. We'll show how it's being used in the workplace and how to experiment with it. Embrace your curiosity and get answers to your questions about AI in a lively discussion, no programming or tech background needed.

​Can't swing the ticket price? We get it - scholarships are available for those in need. Reach out to AI Portland for help.

​ About our presenter Nicolle Merrill is the founder of Boring AI, an AI literacy education company that helps teams upskill for AI in the workplace. Boring AI exists to bring voices from diverse work experiences into the discussion about AI and teach AI literacy skills to adults, no coding or math required. Nicolle has spent the last 6 years working at the intersection of AI and human-centered design. She's also the author of the book, Punch Doubt in the Face: How to Upskill, Change Careers, and Beat the Robots.

​About AI Portland AI Portland is dedicated to exploring the world of Artificial Intelligence and how it can superpower design, development, and our chocolate cookie recipes. We invite industry professionals, enthusiasts, and students to join us in lively discussions, workshops, and networking events.

​Whether you're just starting your AI journey or an expert in the field, this group offers a platform to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and stay updated with the latest AI trends. Let's connect, learn, and shape the future of AI together! Find us on Meetup and LinkedIn.

Looking to raise capital for your AI or data science-based venture? Considering creating a startup in this space? Join the TAO AI & Data Community to hear from and engage with VCs, CEOs and funders in this informative event focused on best practices in finding external capital to launch or grow your business. Panels include some of the leading PNW VCs as well as alternative funding sources, and from CEOs with recent successful fundraising experience. This event will fill up fast, so register now!

Join us at the AI Portland Meetup for an insightful panel discussion on the intersection of generative image AI and the creative industries. Our panelists, each with their unique expertise, will shed light on how professionals in various creative fields are harnessing the power of AI tools while preserving the essence of their craft.

April's Panelists:

Aaron Hockley, Author and Photographer Aaron Hockley is a photographer, author, and speaker who merges his expertise in photography and technology to help others find success. He’s a PPA Master Photographer and Photographic Craftsman and has represented Team USA in the World Photographic Cup. He writes and speaks about technical aspects of photography, photo businesses, and the industry as a whole. He's spoken to audiences of photographers, marketers, and media professionals on stages of all sizes nationwide. Aaron’s recent ventures have focused on how Artificial Intelligence impacts how photographers capture, edit, and manage their images with an eye toward the shifting future of the industry. Find Aaron: https://techphotoguy.com https://youtube.com/@techphotoguy https://instagram.com/techphotoguy

Karly Hand, Brand Developer & Creative Lead Seasoned brand developer and creative director Karly Hand blends strategic insight with creative vision to craft compelling brand narratives. With a distinguished portfolio spanning two decades, she has cultivated and propelled lifestyle brands like Aspen Snowmass, Verb Products, Smith Optics, Microsoft, and Adidas, shaping their identities and communicating their core value through strategic, artful brand expressions.

Karissa Liloc, Principal Product Manager Karissa Liloc (she/her) is a Principal Product Manager at Getty Images focused on Generative AI and other tools that make it easier for customers to find and use imagery. Previously at Disney and Gap, Inc, she has a track record of bringing cross-functional teams together to provide solutions to user problems and business challenges. Her most recent work has been bringing Generative AI by Getty Images to market, offering commercially safe, easy-to-use, AI image generation that compensates creators.

Emily Maass, Attorney Emily represents cutting edge companies as privacy and product counsel, general counsel, and a data protection and cybersecurity advisor. She helps clients navigate complex privacy frameworks, contract negotiations, regulatory compliance, and daily business operations, and she provides ongoing counsel for product development, launch, and management. Emily supports companies in AI, web3, gaming, automation, and software applications serving a broad range of industries.

This event promises a deep dive into the world of generative image AI, providing valuable insights for photographers, designers, AI enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the intersection of technology and creativity. Whether you're an artist seeking to enhance your craft or a business professional curious about the possibilities of AI, this meetup is your opportunity to gain a comprehensive understanding of the subject and engage in thought-provoking discussions.

Join us this Friday, April 19th, at 1 pm PST for a technical walkthrough of the DSPY library with Chris Thompson.

DSPy is a library released out of Stanford University that aims to completely change the prompting process by treating it less like whack-a-mole and more like training a machine learning model.

In this Talk, Christopher will discuss: - Prompt Engineering - OpenAI Functions - Explanation and demonstration of the DSPy library - Q&A

Currently, Chris works as a Machine Learning Articecht for Insight, a Fortune 500 solutions integrator helping organizations accelerate their digital journey.

Join us Friday, April 19th at 1 pm Pacific Time (2 pm MT, 3 pm CT, 4 pm ET).

Register on Meetup: https://bit.ly/TechTalk419 Register on Eventbrite: https://bit.ly/TechTalkE419

Networking Opportunity: For those seeking valuable connections, this event is your golden ticket. Engage, learn, and expand your network with like-minded tech enthusiasts.

Take this chance to gain insights, ask questions, and connect with like-minded individuals. See you there!

OVF is excited to hold the second PDX AI Demo Night!

​The goal of this event is to showcase the AI products coming from the founder and engineering community through lightening demos and Q&A.

​Join us for a fun evening of learning & networking, as we revel in the latest AI demos from:

​ Digs

​ Hello Wonder

​ Skypoint

​ Squidgies

​Agenda:

​ 6:00-6:30pm: Welcome w/ Food & Drinks

​ 6:30-7:15pm: AI Demos

​ 7:15-8:00pm: Networking

​Please be sure to register now, as we have limited capacity and seats will fill quickly!

​The location and any additional details will be provided to registrants prior to the event.

The position of “AI Developer” is a relatively new one. And did you know that they spend less than half their time actually working with AI and writing code? So, what do they spend the rest of their time doing?

Join The Tech Academy at 5:00 p.m. PST (7 CST / 8 EST) for our live online event entitled “A Day in the Life of an AI Developer“ on May 10 (Friday evening), and gain answers to these questions and more.

Erik Gross has been working in tech for decades and at this free workshop, he will “lift the curtain” on the technology sector and AI, and tell you what it’s really like.

Register for this special event now!

Meetup link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshop0510 Eventbrite link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshop510

Hope to see you there!

Artificial intelligence is quickly taking over all of our lives. Like any tool, it can be used for construction or destruction – good or evil.

On May 25 (Saturday evening) the Co-Founder of The Tech Academy, Erik Gross, will teach students how to leverage AI in order to write and debug effective code. This live online free class will start at 5:00 p.m. PST (7 CST / 8 EST).

Learn about useful tools that will help you on your journey as a technology professional!

Register your attendance for this powerful and useful workshop now!

Meetup link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshop0524 Eventbrite link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshopE0524

Join The Tech Academy as we create the popular and classic game “Connect 4” using Python! In this free live class, Erik Gross (our Co-Founder) will cover the basics of coding for absolute beginners.

This online workshop will be hosted through Zoom at 5:00 p.m. PST (7 CST / 8 EST), on May 31 (Friday evening).

This free coding class is for people who have never written code before, and in it Mr. Gross will explain every line of code in plain English. All technical terms and concepts will be defined simply. Python is one of the most-used programming languages in the world and you’ll get your feet wet here!

Register for this fun and educational intro to coding class for beginners now!

Meetup link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkShop0531 Eventbrite link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshopE0531

Artificial intelligence is growing in use and power every day. And unfortunately, it is increasingly being used to scam users through complex schemes and even hacking.

In this free workshop, Erik Gross (Co-Founder of The Tech Academy) will give students tools and resources to protect themselves from AI. He will also show you how to recognize if something was generated by a human or artificial intelligence.

Join The Tech Academy on Zoom at 5:00 p.m. PST (7 CST / 8 EST) for this live online event on June 7 (Friday evening).

Register for this special and useful event now!

Meetup link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkShop0607 Eventbrite link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshopE0607

Learn how to create your very own text-based adventure game, similar to the classic game Zork, at this live class delivered by the Co-Founder of The Tech Academy.

This online workshop will teach the basics of the popular programming language Python, and you can join us on Zoom at 5:00 p.m. PST (7 CST / 8 EST), on June 14 (Friday evening).

This live class is for people who have never written code before, and in it Mr. Gross will explain every line of code in plain English. All technical terms and concepts will be defined simply. Python is one of the most-used programming languages in the world and you’ll get a taste of it here!

Confirm your attendance now for this fun and educational Intro to Python coding class!

Meetup link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkShop0614 Eventbrite link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshopE0614

Join The Tech Academy on Zoom at 5:00 p.m. PST (7 CST / 8 EST) for our live online event entitled “Using ChatGPT to Prepare for Interviews” on June 21 (Friday evening).

The host of this webinar is Erik Gross (our Co-Founder) and he is not only an experienced software developer who has been working in tech for decades, he is an expert in AI and leveraging ChatGPT. At this free workshop, we will cover how to ace interviews with AI. And don’t worry, no cheating is involved! This will be ethical usage of ChatGPT.

Register for this valuable, yet free, event now!

Meetup link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkShop0621 Eventbrite link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshopE0621

Join The Tech Academy at this free, online intro to coding class, hosted live by Erik Gross (our Co-Founder), where he will show you how to create the game “Hangman” using one of the top programming languages in the world: Python.

The class will be held on Zoom on June 28 (Friday evening) starting at 5:00 p.m. PST (7 CST/8 EST).

This workshop is for people who have never written code before, and in it, Mr. Gross will explain every line of code in plain English. All technical terms and concepts will be defined simply.

Register now for The Tech Academy’s fun, simple and educational Intro to Python coding class!

Meetup link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkShop0628 Eventbrite link: https://bit.ly/ErikWorkshopE0628

Come join The Tech Academy at this very special free introductory online coding class, delivered by Senior-Level Software Developer, and our Co-Founder (Erik Gross). In it, Erik will show you how to build a “Tic-Tac-Toe” video game using the popular programming language: Python.

Attend on Zoom at 5:00 p.m. PST (7 CST / 8 EST), on July 12 (Friday evening).

This live Python class is for people who have never written code before, and in it Mr. Gross will explain every line of code in plain English. All technical terms and concepts will be defined simply. Python is one of the most-used programming languages in the world and you’ll get a taste of it here!

Confirm your attendance now at this fun and very special Intro to coding class!

Meetup link: https://bit.ly/Erikworkshop0712 Eventbrite link: https://bit.ly/ErikworkshopE0712

Unlock Your Future with Kevin Zaw: The Tech Talk You Can’t Afford to Miss!

This Friday, 13 of September at 1 PM, dive into the world of tech innovation with Kevin Zaw, a trailblazer who turned his start at The Tech Academy into a stellar career at industry giants like Oracle and Salesforce. With 5 years of high-impact experience, Kevin has become a master in Revenue Transformation, Pre-Sales, and AI - and he’s ready to show you how to do the same!

Here’s Why You Need to Be There:

Discover how Kevin transforms complex challenges into breakthrough solutions with his cutting-edge approach. Get the insider tactics that have helped Kevin drive success at some of the biggest names in tech. Learn how to stay ahead of the curve by mastering AI and positioning yourself at the forefront of industry trends. This isn’t just another talk, it’s your chance to learn from a true industry expert who’s been where you are and knows exactly how to rise to the top.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to elevate your tech career!

Please listen to this podcast episode prior to the event: RadioLab | Voice Clones: - Apple:: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shell-game/id152249110?i=1000668620552 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3bZauVWsfSVMDWUH37RT1e

What's this week's podcast episode about? One man secretly hands off more and more of his life to an AI voice clone. This episode features veteran journalist Evan Ratliff who - for his new podcast Shell Game - decided to slowly replace himself bit by bit with an AI voice clone, to see how far he could actually take it. This episode surfaces questions about AI ethics and how AI agents might impact various aspects of our life and work.

What's an AI Discussion Group for Non-engineers? This is a discussion group for non-engineers focused on exploring the latest applications of AI in business, productivity, and everyday life. Every month, we’ll listen to a podcast on our own, then meet up and discuss in small groups. Attendees should have a fundamental understanding of AI concepts like: multi-agent systems, prompt engineering, natural language processing, and human-centered design.

Our meetings generally follow this format: - Meet and mingle - A few rounds of small group discussions - Grab food/drink somewhere nearby

As we navigate the evolving landscape of AI, understanding and developing robust policies is more crucial than ever. Join us as we discuss practical considerations when evaluating AI policies for your company or team. Leave with real tips and tricks for navigating this at your job.

Meet our panel:

• Suzame Tong, Corporate Marketing Executive: From start-ups to scale-ups through IPO, Suzame Tong is a proven corporate marketing leader with depth of experience in brand, PR, social, and executive and employee communications for global B2B SaaS companies.
• Lyndsey Washburn, Director of Public and Social Sector Policy for the AI Governance Group: Lindsey is a social impact leader and policy expert with over 15 years of experience working across all sectors. As Director of Public and Social Sector Policy for the AI Governance Group, Lindsey provides strategic guidance to nonprofits and governments on how to leverage AI in a responsible and ethical way. She's an inaugural Affiliate of All Tech Is Human, a Research Member of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, and a Responsible AI Advocacy member of the GovAI Coalition, among other affiliations. Lindsey has built her career on bridging gaps between diverse stakeholders and driving systemic change through participatory policymaking, with a particular focus on using technology to strengthen democratic institutions.
• Jordan Plawner, AI Strategy Advisor and Product Management Executive, AI Advisory Group: Founding member of The AI Advisory Group, Jordan was previously Intel's Global Executive Director of AI Product Management, where he led teams to launch seven generations of AI products and build a $3 billion annual business. Jordan specializes in aligning AI technology with organizational needs. As an AI evangelist featured on CNN and Time, he focuses on empowering leadership, transforming workforces, and crafting strategies to integrate AI into business operations.
• Nicole Mors, Co-founder of AI Portland and Group Design Manager at Lithia Motors: Nicole is a seasoned Product Design Leader with a deep passion for crafting engaging digital experiences that drive business success across diverse industries. Her expertise spans leading design teams within tech organizations of all sizes, where she's committed to fostering growth and instilling a culture of passion and enthusiasm.