Activities

Organisations

Two organisations that really helped me are the Google Developer Group (GDG) and the ML Collective (MLC). As someone who has had trouble fitting in all her life, I felt like I discovered community for the first time when I joined the GDG as an organiser, creating and running huge technical events drawing up to 300 people. My PhD journey started in the GDG and I think it is a brilliant endeavour! I realised quite late in my PhD the power of collaborating with other researchers and fortuitously discovered the MLC at a conference. This is where I met my current team of collaborators who helped shape my path. 

• In 2021 I joined the Machine Learning Collective (MLC) as an organiser for the RL stream. We ran a paper reading group and some online coding workshops where we coded RL algorithms together as a team (A3C, DQN and PPO).

• From 2015 to 2020 I organised technical events for the Google Developer Group (GDG) in Reading (see below for some of the larger events we ran). This is an amazing initiative both for the organisers and the attendees! I found myself stepping up to organise and speak at events and really enjoying the community and energy I derived from the experience. I highly encourage people to find a local GDG chapter or start your own if there isn't one! 

  • I organised and ran workshops and coding groups on Google Cloud, Android, Firebase, etc. Some of the events I organised for GDG Reading & Thames Valley are linked: DevFest 2019, DevFest 2018, DevFest 2017, DevFest 2016, DevFest 2015, Events

  • I organised a 6-month bi-weekly workshop based on the fast.ai deep learning course from Jeremy Howard, for which I facilitated several sessions. For many people this was their first experience with practical deep learning and the course went down very well, leading to new careers for some people! 

Other Activities

• I gave some technical talks including an introduction to Machine Learning, Getting Started with TensorFlow, Google Cloud Functions and Google Home Actions development; academic talks and seminars included an introduction to Reinforcement Learning, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, exploiting structure in action spaces for DRL and finally a paper (BCS SGAI) and a poster presentation (NeurIPS Workshop) at academic conferences .  

• I was an early contributor to the OpenMined - PySyft repo in 2017. While I enjoyed learning about and contributing to the federated learning project, I had just started my PhD in RL that consumed my time. I learnt a lot about working with open source teams and made some good friends. 

• I support and invest in an initiative to home a herd of elephants in South Africa, in my native Kwa-Zulu Natal. Loziba has a tough job, balancing the needs of people with these really large animals who struggle to live alongside humans. We hope to bring in AI conservation ideas to assist with navigating this complex terrain, using satellite and other technologies.