Why Should I Join?

Artificial intelligence and machine learning is capable of providing predictions in order to assist business owners in making properly informed decisions

Business tasks that would traditionally be time consuming can be sped up significantly with python and machine learning

Being a member provides many career and skill enhancing opportunities (even during a pandemic)!

Learning Opportunities

SMLB aims to be a community of students from a wide variety of backgrounds open to anybody regardless of experience in programming or business. It is often said that the best education on a topic comes from “jumping right in” to its implementations. With SMLB, we intend to do exactly that; create a space for cooperation and friendly competition for solving real world business problems using machine learning. Such challenges could include identifying irregular transactions, or predicting how much camping gear will be sold at a store during some given month of the year. You can click here to view our past and ongoing challenges.

Networking Opportunities

A major goal of SMLB is to create an environment where different individuals can fill in in the gaps in each others skillsets to achieve and build the most. Have a brilliant idea for an AI startup but are not that familiar with python? Do you understand machine learning and the mathematics that underly it but need help turning this into a tangible product? SMLB is intended to help in both of these types of scenarios and hopefully countless others.

Resources

Machine learning can be a daunting topic, and it can be hard to know where to begin. One of the major advantages of joining is access to our google drive that contains many learning resources pulled from around the internet that is intended to get you started with training algorithms no matter what your skill level is. The goal with our learning materials section is that somebody who has never touched a computer, and somebody who has been coding for years can both start contributing to a project. Through both self-teaching, reading, and consulting a community of people willing to help, you can become ready to implement machine learning in the business world.

Events and Community

Computing science has always been an inherently shareable and collaborative discipline. With SMLB, we intend to give you opportunities to connect with other individuals in the field through conferences, symposiums and more! SMLB will also have internal events as well. Bar nights, presentations and live work sessions are intended to foster a community of people comfortable with helping each other achieve in the world of business. Not interested in training your own models? SMLB is still happy to have you. Machine learning involves other areas of consideration such as ethics, marketing and implementation. We hope to expand our group into having discussions, presentations or competitions on these topics as well.


“It no longer requires a multi-million dollar budget to get AI going in your company. It represents an opportunity to level the playing field for smaller companies.”

— Nichole Jordan, managing partner, Grant Thornton LLP, during the MIT Summit, AI and the Future of Work