Back in Nov 2018 I gave a talk at my local tech group in Sligo, Ireland, on machine learning. The motivation behind the talk came from a recurring question people kept asking me at startup and tech meetups in the town, so I decided to give a talk answering this exact question “How Can A Machine Learn?”.

The topic was certainly something that struck a chord in the local tech community as the venue ran out of chairs and people were standing at the back. My talk lasted about 17 mins, but then the questions started, and went on for over 30 mins. We had to cut them short to make space for the second speaker, Ian Clancy from Valeo’s autonomous driving deep learning team.

The reaction to Ian’s talk was much the same. And it didn’t stop there. By lunch time the next day, the conversation was still going on the Tech group’s meetup page. At this point I put the question to the group, if you are all interested in the topic, how about we run a study group, and I provided an email sign up. Before long we filled the study group twice over.

The Dawn of Skellig.ai

About a week or two after my talk to the tech group I saw a tweet about a similar group starting in Dublin, called Skellig.ai, set up by David Moloney. We decided to join forces, with a vision to run more chapters of Skellig.ai around the country, enabling more people to upskill in machine learning in a community driven collaborative spirit. Our vision was to help the democratisation of machine learning, which is driven by groups like Fast.ai.

Rather than roll out our own Skellig.ai courseware for these community programs, we decided to leverage the fast.ai online course delivered by Jeremy Howard in the UCSF Data Science certificate course run in San Francisco for Silicon Valley professionals.

Our focus is on providing in-person mentorship and guiding students working on work/hobby projects and looking to advance their skills.

Nobody is an Island

Building a community is bloody hard, but we were lucky that from day one the Sligo LEO (Local Enterprise Office) loved what we were doing with Skellig.ai and got behind us 100%. The LEO is there to help local businesses start and grow and they were eager to help their clients adapt machine learning into their businesses.

Over recent years a young and vibrant tech scene has emerged in Sligo between multinationals and startups moving here to setup european offices. With the success of this ecosystem John Reilly, head of the LEO, saw building a machine learning community like Skellig.ai as being the starting point for Sligo to become a data driven town.

What’s next

This is our first blog, so if you’ve made it this far we’re happy you’re still here. We’ll be posting more blogs on the community as it grows, new projects as well as how you can use machine learning to benefit your organisation/business so stay tuned. If you have any queries please reach out to us here.

Our plan for 2020 is to expand into new chapters in different locations. The first one in 2020 will be running alongside the new Regional AI Incubator in Monaghan, Ireland, launching in March with others in the pipeline for Sligo, Kerry, Shannon and Carlow among other locations.

If you’d like to get involved somehow, we’d love to hear from you here.