This is a list of AI resources and communities that you can use to educate yourself and keep up to date on the latest in Artificial intelligence. This is focused on resources available in New Zealand, but naturally many of the online resources are overseas. This is a list of resources that I use or have heard about. If you have another resource that you recommend then please let me know – either in the comments below or directly.
Organisations
AI Forum: a group of business, academic, and government people promoting AI to New Zealand’s benefit. They also coordinate the AI day conference.
TechNZ: Promoting, advancing and connecting NZ technology to help the sector and economy grow. AI is one of the set of technologies it focuses on.
NewZealand.AI is a platform created by Justin Flitter to inform, support and showcase Kiwi businesses using AI. It includes a weekly AI show and a monthly AI happy hour in Auckland.
Podcasts
This medium post outlining the 10 best AI podcasts is how I discovered these. There are only two I end up listening to regularly: TWiML & AI and Linear Digressions. Unfortunately I don’t do enough commuting to listen to more. Let me know if there are others you find useful.
TWiML & AI: is my favourite AI podcast. The host, Sam Charrington interviews different AI practitioners every week, many who are leaders in their field. The content is often very technical, but also with a business slant.
Linear Digressions: Hosted by Katie Malone and Ben Jaffe, each episode covers a different topic in machine learning and data science. Often quite technical, Katie is the specialist and Ben is a software engineer that is asking questions. I like this, not just because they always try to start with a pun
Talking Machines: This podcast quite easy to listen to and gives a good background to the general ideas in machine learning.
Conferences/Meetups
Auckland
AI Day is a full day conference focused on AI in NZ, coordinated by the AI Forum and NewZealand.AI. It’s first conference is March 2018 in Auckland
AI Happy Hour is a monthly meetup designed for tech savvy business leaders keen to learn about artificial intelligence, practical use cases and first-hand development know-how. It is run by NewZealand.AI
Auckland AI and Machine Learning Meetup: A broad range of machine learning, artificial intelligence programming and data science topics. Although it at the time of writing the last meet up was in August 2017.
Christchurch
Christchurch AI meetup: Focused on AI in Canterbury this group includes professionals and students. This group was started by Andy Masters but I believe ChristchurchNZ will be helping to ensure we get regular events.
Christchurch Big Data meetup is for anybody who is interested in Big Data, Machine Learning, scalable data processing and analytics, and its’ business applications.
Christchurch Python user group meetup: For anything that relates to the Python programming language. Not specifically focused on AI – but it does come up.
Dunedin
A seminar series discussing the social and ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence . Run by an interdisciplinary group, drawn from several departments at the University of Otago. 25 Seminars are scheduled for 2018.
Wellington
Wellington Machine Learning & Data Science meetup: Talks and networking for anyone interested in data science and machine learning with a focus on how they lend themselves to problem-solving in business and social sciences.
University courses
If anyone can point me to a good summary of AI related courses at NZ universities please let me know. Here’s the undergrad course I found with a quick Google search.
- Auckland University: CompSci 367/761: Artificial Intelligence. Covers knowledge engineering, machine learning, Prolog & search
- Waikato University: COMP316: Artificial Intelligence techniques and applications. Covers artificial intelligent search, logic-based and probabilistic knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning.
- Massey University: 159.302 Artificial Intelligence. Covers AI programming, state space representation and search, heuristics, planning, game playing, knowledge representation, knowledge-based systems, natural language processing, machine learning, teasoning under uncertainty & philosophical issues.
- Victoria University: 5 different courses. Covering an introduction to AI, machine learning data mining, neural nets, genetic programming and intelligent agents.
- Canterbury University: 4 courses. Covering Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, intelligent tutoring systems, & computer vision
- Otago University: 3 Neural network courses. Covering neural networks, language, & computational neuroscience. As well as Cosc343: covering embodied AI and robots, machine learning algorithms (with a focus on neural networks), search and optimisation algorithms (including genetic algorithms), probabilistic reasoning methods (including Bayesian methods), natural language processing (including symbolic grammars and statistical methods)
Online Courses
There are a gazillion courses online – I’ve included the one I am doing and those that I hear about most. Let me know if there’s others you recommend.
CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition. This Standford University course is available on YouTube and the assignments are available online. This gives you a great understanding of deep learning and it’s application to image recognition.
Coursera has a host of AI courses. The one I hear referenced most is Andrew Ng’s machine learning course.
Udacity also has a bunch of AI courses, including deep learning.
Social media
Artificial Intelligence & Deep learning Facebook group: This is a great way of keeping up to date with AI news and advances.
Newsletters
The Algorithm from MIT Technology Review. This daily newsletter explains and links to AI stories from around the world. There’s normally something interesting in here.
KDnuggets: is a popular site focused on Business Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, Data Science, and Machine Learning edited by Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and Matthew Mayo. They have over 200K subscribers.
Ben Reid’s Memia Labs newsletter provides an excellent update on AI news, especially as it relates to New Zealand. The frequency has dropped recently, probably because Ben is organising AI day and training for crazy endurance events, but I’m sure it will return.
Google Scholar: A friend finds this very helpful. He follows Yoshua Bengio, Ian Goodfellow, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, and Geoffrey Hinton. Every now and then he get an email with any new publications with their name on, which has been very helpful. He often just read the abstract which gives him a good idea of what people are working on
Websites
- Quora topics such as Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, etc
- Medium topics such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning etc.
- Reddit: This machine learning subreddit often posts interesting articles. It’s also a place to get good answers to any questions you have.
Thought Experiment 