AI Challenges and Competitions

AI Challenges and Competitions will be the subject of our next meetup on Feb 7th.  We switched our meetups to the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays for the month of February. We will likely stick to this through May.

When we started Huntsville AI back in 2018, the primary avenue for challenges and competitions was Kaggle. This brought notoriety to several people (e.g. Jeremy Howard) and led to an approach for quickly iterating through several approaches to find the model or data manipulation that best fit the problem.

The landscape for challenges and competitions is now much different, with many requiring a significant resource investment in hardware to be able to compete. We’ll take a look at several organizations that manage these competitions and walk through a few open competitions to discuss.

Links:

• Challenge.gov
• Kaggle
• Numer.ai
• Driven Data
• AI Crowd
• ML Contests

Details:

• Date – 02/07/2024
• Time – 6-7pm
• Location – HudsonAlpha
• Address –  601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
• Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88417365505?pwd=dGFDZTZzbUNtclRrODFOSUZUM3BSUT09

HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge (HATCH) will be March 1-3 this year. They are not doing sessions specific to HATCH leading up to the event, so we will stick to our normal AI focused programming. If you would like to sign up as a tech mentor, there are still a lot of slots available. Sign up on their Sign-up Genius Form.

Huntsville AI Task Force is an effort by the City of Huntsville to put together a group of people to evaluate the impact of AI on Huntsville’s workforce and provide guidance to shape future efforts from the city. I was invited to participate and will be flowing information and questions to you. So far, there are members of this task force from the usual RSA folks (Army, FBI, NASA) along with HudsonAlpha, UAH, AAMU, Huntsville Hospital, Mazda Toyota, IBM, and Meta. There was a kickoff meeting on January 26, with the next meeting to follow at the end of this month.

Space and Rocket Center AI Symposium is happening on February 20-23. This might be of interest of you have the $450 to sign up for both days. If some of our folks can attend, maybe we can put together on overview to present afterward to help with our vision: “Our vision is a group of individuals and organizations in the metro Huntsville area who collaboratively advance the knowledge and application of artificial intelligence in ways that make it available to everyone and improve our quality of life.”

Topics for 2024 will be the end or our discussion on Wednesday. From the end of 2022 and all the way through 2023, there were ground-breaking announcements on a monthly basis that made it difficult to plan ahead. I feel like this may be settling down for a minute, so we should be able to get back to something more sensible. Take a look at what we have planned and completed in the past to see what’s already on the board. I have some scheduled based on SBIR topic releases, but I need your feedback for what other topics you would like to cover. You can reach the board on Github here: https://github.com/HSV-AI/presentations/projects/1