The Melbourne Deep Learning Group (MDLG) is in the first place a research group, but given the broader importance of these technologies and urgency of Australia adopting them, we also take on a responsibility for helping to educate students at the University of Melbourne, and the broader Australian community. There are many free or low-cost introductory courses on deep learning, e.g. deeplearning.ai and fast.ai and there is no point in us reproducing some slight variation on this content. However, while there is plenty of content available, that doesn't mean it is trivial to learn in a vacuum (that's what classes are for!).
We therefore focus our attention on facilitating a thriving local community and runnning short events that help to motivate members of this community to deepen their understanding of these technologies and their applications, and to meet collaborators (e.g. we would be thrilled if at one of our events, a young mathematician and a computer scientist meet and go on to make something useful to society).
We imagine this MDLG learning community as beginning with ourselves and our Masters and PhD students, and it is organised in the first place around the MDLG discord, an online study group and discussion forum, and our online public office hours on Zoom (see the MDLG page for schedules).
We hope to run regular public events, which might include:
- Deep learning bootcamps (leveraged off some pre-assigned background reading from online material)
- Group competitions using Colab to solve some problem using deep learning