mikuns/Predict-Hourly-Taxi-Ride---Lagos-AI-Hackathon-

Team A1 (2nd Place) Submission for the Lagos AI Hackathon that held on July 21st 2018, organised by Facebook NG_Hub, AI Saturday Lagos, InstaDeep, Africa's Talking and Women In Machine Learning # Predict_Hourly_Taxi_Ride-Lagos-AI-Hackathon- Team A1 (2nd Place) Submission for the Lagos AI Hackathon that was held on July 21st 2018, organised by Facebook NG_Hub, AI Saturday Lagos, InstaDeep, Africa's Talking and Women In Machine Learning. The competition was hosted on kaggle kaggle.com # My Experience This was my second AI Hackathon and was quite a refreshing one. InstaDeep Co-Founder & CEO, Karim Beguir gave a wonderful speech on the current trend of AI and how Africa needs to take a stand now so as not to be left out. For the Hackathon, we were shared into groups of 4 or 3, and the task was to predict the hourly Taxi ride in New York. I was my team's leader and it was a wonderful experience. We fought really hard but were bitten at the near end. I would be sharing my takeaways from the event below: # My Takeaways 1. Have a sound computing device with internet availability; I had internet issues and had to settle for Jupyter notebook on my laptop which was an issue for me because my laptop ran out of memory and crashed a couple of times. 2. Teamwork is key: We shared tasks which help simplify the work. Also brainstorming was basically key to our result. 3. Being tensed and all worked up won’t do you any good. Just take a break and refresh 4. Don’t compare your team to others; Just keep aiming for greater heights and see where it leads you. 5. Communities are great for learning; you learn a lot and get to connect and share ideas. 6. Always have a backup internet service; We had issues using cloud ML tools for training because of networks issues due to a stream of individuals connected to one network 7. AI in Africa is growing rapidly. We are definitely not letting this "AI age" pass us by. Africa's golden generation is underway.