Hello Everyone, I am one the co-organisers for the Brisbane AI User Group. I thought I would mention how I started with the meetup, my purpose with being a part of the meetup as well as what I learned during the journey to get this up and running.
I hope this article inspires everyone who is looking to start their meetup or start presenting at a meetup.
When I first moved to Brisbane in 2018 to start my new role as a Consultant, I wanted to make some contacts in my field. With that in mind, I started attending Power BI meetup along with my colleagues.
Participating in the Power BI meetups motivated me to join other meetup groups like the Azure Meetup and the SQL Server Meetup in Brisbane.
My interested in the organisation of meetups increased as I attended these more of them, which gave the idea of helping out at one.
“If not now, when? If not me, who?”
I attended the Global AI Summit hosted in Brisbane at the end of the year, where I met my co-host, David Alzamendi. I started discussing how he ran the Global AI summit and if I would be able to help in the future.
There were no opportunities at the time, but we agreed to keep in touch for the next Global AI Summit in 2020.
Things went quiet for a while as both of us became involved in projects at work. Then COVID hit!!!.
We got in touch with each other again on the 2nd of May to discuss a meetup and see how we could proceed. I also came to know that David was having similar conversations with Jernej Kavka (JK) about a meetup.
After some further discussions we decided to combine our efforts and start a meetup together.
We had two reasons for choosing Artificial Intelligence.
We wanted to aim our meetup to Beginners and Intermediates in this field and make it slightly more relevant for developers.
As hosts, we use Microsoft platform in our day to day work, and we wanted to introduce solutions built using other cloud providers.
We had two meetings per week to discuss topics like the formation of the group, marketing, a method to track presentations and to formulate a mission statement for the user group.
We started looking around for presenters for our first meetup once we organised the marketing and tracking of presentations.
We reached out to some of our contacts and happily we had a couple of presenters from Microsoft who were happy to come and present for us.
Once we received confirmation from the presenters, it was then a case of getting ready for the actual meetup.
We spent two days a week to practice for the meetup by assigning roles to each of us and creating a run-plan that we used for the presentation.
Our first presentation Creating a face of Azure Speech Cognitive Services was on Microsoft Azure and cognitive services. Valeriia Savenko and Tim Leyden took us through a sample project that they had built to analyse audio calls and drive potentially actionable insights in a Call Centre.
To read up on Azure Cognitive services, I would recommend starting with the following link
Check [Speech to Text Batch Transcription – Demo] on GitHub for the source code used during the Brisbane AI meetup. I would encourage everyone to download the solution and try it out.
For the second presentation Knitted Disruption, I managed to contact Kristine Howard, the team lead of solution architects at Amazon AWS.
The presentation itself was fascinating!!! It showcased how Kris tried to reverse engineer a knitting pattern using Artificial Intelligence and AWS Sage Maker. If you are interested in Knitting patterns, visit the pattern sites at the following addresses
It was a great experience in organising the Brisbane AI user group. Attending them for the last couple of years, I didn’t realise the time and effort in organising and running them. I would highly recommend becoming involved in your community to run these events if you have the opportunity to do so.
The next stages for me will be to take a topic in AI and present at a User Group this year. I also want to reach more presenters and make more contacts in my public speaking persona.
The next goal is to increase the membership for our group and maybe take it national and international. This goal of making it global will require a lot more work, and I will keep everyone updated once this happens.
Veni, Vidi, Vici
Please feel free to look through the other topics on Azure Data Factory from my Blog HomePage
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