 who is coming to us from Beirut. He is the founder of Beirut AI. He has a very long history and experience in working at the building of AI. Essentially, he was teaching computer vision and image processing at all. It's a Moscow that was going on, and he's going on still at the American University of Albania, and he's going to talk about how to build an AI community. The talk might be a little short, but we'll leave time for more questions and answers. Hi everyone, thank you for coming. This topic is very important to me, and as you may have noticed, it's not going to be a technical presentation. It's just going to be me telling you my story, what I've been doing in the last couple of years, and basically what I've learned from all of the activities that I've been doing. So for those who don't know me, my name is Christos Obli. I studied software engineering at the university. After graduating, I worked for a couple of years as a mobile developer, and then I decided to quit and work on startup with a couple of friends. Can you guys read me in the back? Okay, I'm sorry, I would break my voice. So I have a background in software engineering. After studying and graduating from university, I worked for a couple of years as a software engineer, and then I quit my job, and I was working with a couple of friends on startup, and this is where I got introduced to machine learning, computer vision, and this whole world of AI. And I completely fell in love with this. I liked it so much. And just like anyone who falls in love, they want to tell everyone about it, they want to share it with the whole world. So this is exactly what happened with me. I wanted to see who else is working with machine learning in Lebanon, who else is doing this cool project. So I started organizing some meetups, some events, and basically this has led to Beirut AI, which is why I'm standing here and telling you my story. Also I'm the founder of ZAKA, an AI company with the aim of developing the AI sector in Lebanon and in the region. So let's start by defining a bit what a community is. So what do you guys think a community is? What is the definition of a community? Does anyone have a... A group of people are working for the common goal, maybe? That's actually a group of people that share a common interest, so people that share a common interest. And we've all been part of different communities and throughout our lives we always step into and out of communities. So for example, our family can be a community, our workplace is a multi-community, maybe our neighborhood is also a community. And this data science summer school is also a community that along a certain essence or the goal of the community, which is data science. And so it's very important for us humans to belong to a certain community, because we are social creatures, we like to share experiences, we like to... when we're happy we like to share with friends, when we're sad we like to have some friends around. So it's important for us to have this sense of belonging to a certain community. And the same thing can be applied in the technical world and in the technology world. So you can see a lot of communities built around a certain technology or a certain maybe software language or whatever. So this is the kind of technology that I will be talking about today. Sorry, the kind of community I will be talking about today. So this is one of the first meet-ups that I organized in Lebanon. It was not for the AI, it was actually for another community called Papers Without. So this was a community for computer science geeks that like to read and discuss computer science papers. So obviously there's not a lot of these people, so you can see like six were attending at this meet-up. But I learned a lot from organizing events such as these. This is another picture. This is the first AI event I organized. It was for Lebanon AI meet-up group that I also hosted. It was a little deep learning. And so you can see that a bit more people attending, but still not a huge number. So basically shortly after this event I was traveling to Amsterdam. So I was trying to see if there are some AI or machine learning meet-ups happening there. So I did visit and have a look. So while researching I found out about Amsterdam AI. And from there I found out about city AI, which is this huge community of AI around the world. And so I decided that this is something that my community needs, that I can do the same thing in Beirut. Try to group AI people together, try to get some people excited about this field. And hopefully maybe try to put Lebanon in Beirut on the global map. So as soon as I returned from this trip I started organizing events and growing this community. And I'm very proud to say that after a bit less than two years we have a great community in Lebanon. Beirut AI is the applied AI community. As you can see we're organizing events for more than six people. So we have some more people are interested in our events. And what I like about it is it's not just a technical community for technical people. It's also basically for anyone who wants to learn about AI and basically apply AI. So our mission is to enable everyone to understand and apply artificial intelligence. And so for that reason we do multiple types of events. We have technical events for technical people who want to basically code and learn how to apply the AI path. And so we have non-technical events for anyone who just wants to learn what AI is and how it's being applied in different industries. Like I said we're part of CTAI which is a global community. And this community has more than 60, I guess this is a bit outdated actually. It's more than 80 cities around the world. So this number is growing every month. And a lot of people are also joining us to start doing this more AI activities. So today I'll tell you, I try to summarize basically everything I've learned in two years into 10 steps. Or 10 points that you should keep in mind if you want to start building the community and grow it and maintain it. So let's start. The first one is you need to find your essence. You need to start by looking at your ecosystem and see what's missing in the ecosystem. What is the need? But that's something that people basically have a need for that's not being fulfilled. Don't look at the ecosystem and for example see another community that's already growing and do the same thing. This is definitely will not work. If there's a community that you like to be part of, join this community and help them grow and scale. But if you think this community is missing something, then this is your need, this is your essence. So try to find something that can complement the other part and not compete with the other people. And once you identify this need, now you have to figure out how to fulfill this need. So who are your target audience? Are they technical people? Are they basically anyone working in this field? Are there people who don't know technology? What's the right format of events that you need to organize? Because this also depends on the need itself and on the target audience. So start by defining the essence of the need that you need to solve and then start by figuring out who's the target audience and how do you want to reach this audience. So the easiest part about building a community is that you don't have to do it alone. So there's a great African proverb that I really like. It says if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. This is very important in my opinion because if you want to build a community, you want to build something that lasts, that goes forever. So it's very important to build something that can last. So you need to find partners that you like to work with. You need to find people that are as excited about this as you are. People that want to have the same mission and the same goal and want to help you build and grow this community. These people need to have the same vision. So you can motivate them when they're feeling down and then they can motivate you when you're feeling tired and feeling down. And it's not an easy thing, by the way. It's very frustrating to find the right people that can work with you and that can help you grow this community. But the good thing is that it's an ongoing process. So you never have to build a team and then this is a team that will be with you forever. You start basically small, you start with a couple of people and as the community is growing, the team will also grow. So don't be afraid to give people chances to let people come in, come out and test which one are good fit for you, for your team, for the rest of the team. And eventually you will find a team that can basically help you and complement each other. So the first step is, it's great that you figured out what's missing and maybe you were able to convince a couple of people to join and help you build this. But it's very important to take it to the next step and actually take an action. So this is the first step you need to do is basically act on this need and then just think about it. And you might find this a bit weird and it's obvious, but actually it's not. So from my experience of setting up communities, this is where a lot of people fail because it's very easy to again define the need and then maybe get some people excited as well. Yeah, let's do this. But then start organizing the first event, for example. And for some reason you find that after three or four months you're still figuring out what's the best format and I want to make a good first impression. I want to have a good first meetup. This has happened with me so many times. I had a lot of people within CTAI to set up their ecosystem to start a new chapter. So basically after we set everything, we onboard the city, we find a team. And then after some months they still don't know what to do. They're still figuring out what's the best format. And I'm going to wait and I want to make sure my first event is in some way. And eventually the momentum dies, that excitement goes away as well and then you find that nothing happens. So a lot of potential communities die before they have the chance to be exposed to people. So that's why I want to say, just like any other project, it might be hard to take the first step but after you just take a step, everything will be clear, it will make sense and you can start building from there. So like it says, start small, do a small event. Even if the first event only attracted 10, 15 people, that's a great way to start, learn from this and then move on and grow it. So after you decide on your first meetup and start organizing things, it's time to let everyone know about this community, about this meetup. So that's why you need to reach out to these people. Because after all, it's not a community if there are no people. If you're doing events for two or three people, then that's not a community. So you always need to find the right platform, the right channel to reach out to your audience and connect with them. And this is not something that you can, that you will do only once for your first meetup. This is something that's constantly, you're always doing it, you're always reaching out to new people, you're always growing your community, you're always finding ways to get more people involved and make your community accessible to more people. So one way of doing this is, for example, sending out newsletters, so updates about what you're doing, upcoming events. Something recently started at the AI, it's called Monthly Recap. So at the end of every month, we send like a blog post that summarizes everything we did during this month and a bit of upcoming events. So this helps people stay up to date with what's happening because maybe not everyone can attend every event and we do a lot of events per month. So it's a way for people to keep track of what we're doing, keep up with our updates and to also feel like they're part of the community. So that's very important. You can do it throughout any channel, you might be using Facebook, you might be using LinkedIn, you might be just sending emails or whatever. It's up to you, it's up to your community, but it's always nice to connect with people. So throughout your journey, you meet a lot of people that come to your community from different backgrounds that have different ideas and different visions for what they want to do. So for me, I see each person as they have a story that they have something new to add to the community. And it's very important not to be closed on this, in fact to be very open, because you shouldn't assume that your members are all the same and they all should have the same background. It's very good to have diversity in this community because having diversity ensures that your community lasts long and is strong to whatever problems it might face. So you always remember that you're building a community for the community, not for yourself. So always be inclusive, always accept everyone, always try to get new people and to add diversity. Yeah, so this is a bit counterproductive and a lot of people might disagree with me. I know my wife disagrees with me on this, but I really believe that you should be a yes person, especially if you're starting something new. So always say yes to any opportunity because anytime you say yes to an opportunity, you don't know whether this might lead to a community too. So it's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of time spent maybe and that you try to do something else with it. But I think it's very important to get it out there for example, a lot of people ask me to go with presentations or do some talks or give workshops to whatever companies or groups or NGOs or some stuff and it's a lot of time that I waste, but I also I love it because it's a chance for me to tell people about my community, about my mission, about what I'm trying to do. So this is me connecting to new people and broadening the reach of my community. So it might be unlisted, but I think it's very important to have it. So be a yes person. Always make sure that you're listening to your audience because the community is not you and your team, the community is everyone who attends your events, everyone who follows you on social media. So make sure that you're listening to them, that you're listening to their needs and that you're giving them value because otherwise they will stop coming and it doesn't mean anything to be a part of a community that doesn't help you learn and grow. So you should always get the feedback of people but you feel if you're doing something wrong, if you might be doing something better, how you can improve. So one easy way to do this is to send a feedback form after every event. This is something we've always been doing. Something else that I like to do personally is after every event I have to chat with attendees, with the people, ask them what did they like about the event, what they did not like, how can you make it better? So one big example is when we first started doing events in Beirut, we were not doing technical events so a lot of people asked us to hey, I want to learn how to apply this. This is interesting, this is awesome, but how can I apply it? So then we started doing technical workshops and they've been really successful to a point where now we're trying to replicate the same thing all over city AI and different cities are trying to take the same workshops that we did and try to do that in the cities. But at first when I started doing things I thought that there's a lot of online courses, online content, people don't need me to basically that's what I thought. But then I realized that it's actually people still prefer to go bring their laptop to a classroom sit with other people in front of an instructor and have this one-on-one interaction. And so basically if I had not listened to my community then I would still be doing things that no one cares about. So always reassess your values, your direction and the only thing that am I doing whatever is good for the community or am I doing whatever I think is good for the community. Yeah, so this is, I can't stress this enough, but you should always try to make mistakes. Because if you're not making mistakes then not doing anything new. And if you're not doing anything new then you're stuck in your comfort zone and you all know what happens in the comfort zone. Nothing grows in the comfort zone. So you need to be growing your community, you need to be taking chances, making mistakes and of course learning from these mistakes. So you need to step out, try to innovate, try to find new ways to deliver the same message to engage with the people and to give them basically a value. For example, tomorrow we're trying something new in Beirut AI. So for the first time ever we're doing an online event. So I have no idea if this will work or not. It's something that we want to try. So I'm not even going to be in Beirut to do this, but I guess that's the point of having online events. So you can join from anywhere in the world and if this is a successful event we will be sure to make more events online. We can basically don't have to be in Beirut or to drive to our location to be part of our events and one can join from wherever. So that's not a mistake. What event is it? It's just an introduction to AI. It's a presentation event. We're going to start small because if we want to make a mistake it's better to have a small English. It's going to be in English? Yeah, it's in English. So connect to the workshop and just listen. It's an intro to AI. It's like a one hour introduction. This is the same presentation we gave. So this year we also started something called the University Ambassador Program because like I was saying we listened to our audience and basically we realized that a lot of people who are attending our technical workshops, they used to be university students and a lot of them can't make it because we already do our workshops because some of them maybe live far or don't have transportation. So then we realized that why don't we go to their campus and do the similar events on campus so it's easier for them to be part of the events. So we created this program where we recruited one volunteer in every university and their job is to help us organize events on campus and so this year we went to 16 or 16 university and it also helped us to basically bring our mission to more people and grow our community and have more people accessible. So that's another example of how we basically listen to people what they're asking and we get them what they want. So I really wanted to make this a 10 11 points so I put these two together and I guess that would go very well together. So work hard and be passionate and this might look so trivial. I think these are the two most underrated concepts that you'll ever hear because everyone knows that you have to be passionate and you have to work hard but I don't think anyone really knows what it means to work hard. So working hard is like spending money with Rick and doing things you don't like to do and coming up. Working hard is like I can't find a graphic designer to make posters so I learn it myself so I'm glad to say that I can use Photoshop and Illustrator now and so I'll be able to use After Effects because I always find problem finding a graphic design so I do it myself which is not something I'm always proud of but I mean you have to do what you have to do. So it's very hard to stop so it's a lot of effort at first and if you're a small team the task might look very big so you need to push and keep pushing and maybe with time this board that you're pushing will start getting momentum and at the same time the team that you're working with will grow and will help you push even more and eventually you'll reach a point where everything becomes easier but at first you really have to work hard and working hard alone is not enough I think you also have to be passionate which is I think it's a bit obvious but still because if you're not passionate you can do any of the points that I just described so you can't really find a need that you need to fulfill you can't convince other people to help you build and grow on this need you can't connect to other people and reach out you can't be a yes person and say yes to every opportunity you can do any of the things that you mentioned if you have hard-working passionate members of the early team this is what makes or breaks a community because there's a certain threshold that you need to reach we call it critical mass or whatever so if you don't reach this level of sustainability I think this is where communities die eventually after some time it happened with me with my previous for example papers were out I mentioned earlier so you need to work hard a lot until you reach this point the community is so big and the team is so successful at pushing everything that just keeps rolling and it's so easy to do things so yeah work hard and be passionate and what do you think the last point is it's the most important one it's not fun because after all what are we doing is not for fun no one is forcing us to do this then if we're not enjoying ourselves what's the point of everything so I really believe that having a community should be a place where you can connect to other people and learn and grow but at the same time it has fun while you do this so these are good summary for 10 points I really hope you enjoyed this talk although it was very short but I cannot stretch it more than this I really hope you enjoyed it so maybe create your own community or be part of the community and help it grow further and thank you so much for your time if you have any questions I would like to discuss that point yes would you share with us some examples of the diversity of people you have in the different communities yes so for example okay so we have in the period we have a lot of people who started doing events a lot of people came from the area that we started around Beirut but then we realized that there's a huge potential and there's a town called Tripoli not sure if you know about that it's like an effect to our life in Beirut or maybe less and we realized that there's a lot of people there that are glad to attend but also far from them and so we went once and now we're preparing to do more events outside of Beirut to try to reach people that aren't only in our own ecosystem we want to reach people that have different backgrounds from basically different areas with different cultures so this is one way of trying to be inclusive another way is I don't have a specific example but we never say no to any opportunity of maybe joining forces with another community and collaborating together so this actually I think as diversity is our community so so you have people who create AI programs, coders, etc and you have people who really know nothing about AI and want to learn yes, so for example last month we went to the Opportunities Fair that was hosted at AUB, American University of Beirut and there were this program that they take Syrian refugees and under privileged kids and they give them two months digital training and soft skills English training and stuff like that so this was the graduation party and they wanted us to be part of the people that expose these people to opportunities like for example internships or whatever and when the people self is coming and asking me what are you, what do you do so I'm like yeah really apply AI community and they're like okay what is AI I was so shocked because for me everyone at least knows what AI is but then I discovered that actually no I'm living in this problem everyone that I know knows what AI is even if they don't know how to apply it but they know what the concept of artificial intelligence is so people haven't heard of the concept of AI so now we're working on going to all this region to have at least one day where we just introduce them to the idea of AI there's something called AI you should know about it, that's it so that's one example and I always like sometimes you get so close on with your world that you forget to take that out and see the whole picture and what everyone else is doing and what's that like thank you could you go back I mean like I work with people and I have friends and I have my close community and usually I don't have any for example Syrian refugees friends for some reason so I don't know people from outside of my bubble what they're doing, what they're background I mean I assume that everyone that at least went to a certain particular development class should know what AI is like at least should have heard of the term artificial intelligence so I was shocked to hear that they don't know what artificial intelligence is some of them knew by the way it's not like everyone didn't know but more than 50% did not know artificial intelligence so this was the job to me that I explained the public concept could you go back one slide please yeah so first you have to find the need that you need to fulfill in the community so what are you trying to do what's your commitment to doing if it's the same thing as someone else then don't waste your time just go help them out and build this don't compare because it doesn't make sense after you find your essence and you're like you're need you need to figure out how to fulfill this need so who are you target audience how you will reach them what's the trauma of the events you need to do finding people that can help you pick off this it's a lot of hard work so if you can find people that can help you that would be great and these people should be like show the same goals as you show the same vision and are as excited as you are and then once you find this tool take action don't just do anything just do the first event put it out there try to get people to and push it as much as you can so this is the first three four points which one did you couple of questions you said you have several events per month how much time are you spending on this voluntary more than actually and second AI is so diverse so do you have events geared towards different specifics of AI or everybody attends what are the example topics for you the first type of events we started doing were quarterly with us so every quarter every three months we bring local people from the community companies from university people who have been working with any phone of AI because AI is so broad so they can be doing computer vision detection or something anything that falls under AI we bring these two speakers and each one gives 20 minute presentation about one project they work on what they learn what tools they use how they approach this it's not too technical it's for everyone and there are three events so that's one format another one is technical workshops so these are three hour workshops where students or technical people bring their laptops and come and every time we pick a new topic or a new problem and we work on it together so we've done computer vision we've done time series analysis we've done basic Python into TensorFlow we've done market basket analysis we've done the commandation system kind of like we try to do everything because some people prefer this topic or they want to learn this one so we want to cater for everyone's needs we've done once a discussion panel because we were at an event and it happened to have a discussion between people and the audience liked it so they asked hey why don't we have a discussion panel so we did a discussion panel a lot of people thought they wanted to work with hardware so we're working now on a future workshop that we're involved deploying your AI models on hardware I think you also know about this also for the next year we're planning on doing workshops but for non-technical people so a lot of people let's say you work in marketing and you want to see what AI can do for you so you want to organize workshops not just lectures on how you as a marketing person can benefit from AI also let's say finance or business or graphic design or anything so this is future plans to try to get at working towards it sounds like a full-time job and it is actually a full-time job but also I try to manage it as much as possible so what's your relationship with sorry what's your relationship with industry how is it how is the industry participating in the I mean the private companies and so on so the idea is for some reason people like to work in silos if you're working, let's say you have a company and you're doing some stuff with AI it's very rare that you would share this with people like I recently discovered I met a person at an AI conference outside of Beirut who was from Lebanon and he worked at a company that owns multiple restaurants and I recently learned that they've been doing some stuff with data for the past three years and it was super exciting but at the same time told them why haven't you been talking about this why haven't you been attending events and try to engage the community and so it's a bit like everyone's doing their thing and they try to close up on it instead of open it up so that's kind of the experience I have with some people otherwise there's not a lot of people doing AI things so this is why we're also trying to push this education so right now we have this AI bootcamp next month in August which is also something we're trying for the first time so that's how it works we got a lot of interest and a lot of people companies they want to participate they want to send their employees they want them to learn this so hopefully like in the coming years we'll see some collaboration and some more AI projects coming out of this ecosystem do you have questions? first 2025 people will start to attend your events do they have similar characteristics for example they were software engineers it was a diverse actually but more like 60% technical people maybe a bit more but there were some people who aren't technical but they just hear about AI and they want to know what AI is and everyone falls out of this and those 40% they continue attending the yes I mean I don't have exactly the number of people that keep coming back but we really don't have people that are part of the community that show up on every event that attend everything and I don't know exactly the percentage but yeah I mean some people attend for the first time and then never show up some people think AI is whatever they think AI is so they attend and they say oh this is not where I thought it would be so they just leave like we have technical workshops we have literally said bring your laptops it's going to be involved coding and then I get people coming hey I'm a graphic designer I just want to know what AI is so they just sit and then 5 minutes later they feel okay this is too boring and then just leave you always have, you can't please everyone but I think it's been successful enough to get some momentum going and grow the community of it I'm interested, who are your speakers are they industry top leaders or it's more like lecturers or like in the case studies or based on their experience from their companies like they are on top positions so yeah exactly not really top positions but they have experience with AI they have built something with it so it's very diverse so for example one time we brought there's a professor at Michigan University he's a Lebanese guy he's living in the US he's working there and he was visiting Lebanon at the same time we had an event so he came to get his speech it was very interesting because this guy is kind of a leader and he does work a lot with these things but other times you just find any startup that are doing some things and they're usually not like to be doing things they are actually doing some stuff so they get literally experience of how they built this how they implemented it it can be something not super advanced like for example one time we had a new commerce website they had an e-commerce website and they built an accommodation system so they just shared their experiences they had zero experience in AI but they just read about it online and tried to figure out some things and they built something so it's not ideal but I mean the point is it's not to give the knowledge this was not a technical event it was a quarterly meetup so it's about to showcase what AI can do for different things so let's say you're working on an e-commerce website how can you benefit from AI you can basically build a recommendation system or just to get people excited about it so it's very diverse we have people very extremely advanced and people that just start getting started and they work on a project and they want to share it these 10 steps can be used for building other communities for the private community or digital marketing community but which one would you say is the best way for AI for building AI community I mean it's a the only difference I see is AI has a lot of hype nowadays so it's not hard to get 100 people to attend an AI event it's hard to make them attend again and again and keep coming but I don't brag about doing an event and getting a lot of people to attend one time and it's because you know what this AI is there's a huge hype around it the difficult part is basically keep them coming giving them value and benefiting from this sometimes you don't have free events you have paid events so if you pay at least one dollar and it's not something that you benefit from you will not come again so the fact that every time you make let's say a paid event it's always people that want to come and give some value at least to these people so maybe if you want to focus only on the AI part and not just anything else I say maybe reach out and connect I don't know it's not in here but make sure that you give value to your community there's a lot of points that I can say a million things but I try to summarize them steps how to start and how to work can you tell me more about this CTAI network and how do you benefit from it yeah so CTAI is like I said it's a network of different CTAI we have I don't know Paris AI all over Europe we have we met by being connected to this huge network by sharing experiences by sharing ideas so every month we have a global ambassador hangout so it's an online one hour hangout session where hopefully everyone joins sometimes not everyone is able to join but it's just people joining sharing their experiences hey I'm doing this thing in Beirut for example oh that's a nice idea I would like to replicate this in my own city how can we collaborate for example so it's just connecting to other people and sharing ideas that's mainly the most beneficial thing for me and sometimes I say if you're organizing an event and you need speakers you can get people that are working in this field from different countries to come as speakers or as instructors or however you would like sometimes there's opportunities I say someone is looking for someone with this type of skill so it's like being connected to these global people that are stakeholders in AI in some form and not all of them are technical people so we have ambassadors who again like their business people marketing or product managers or whatever but they're interested about AI so they try to build some activities around this and for example if someone will open a one AI how can we become the member of this I mean if you can I can help you like I said I do this with a lot of people so we can set up the onboarding process to create the website, the connection and everything else but you have to do the part 2 3 as well so I've done this to many cities and they start at part 2 at number 2 so they get some people to work with they get everything and then nothing happens so I was like being down here guys, what's up, when's the next event they always come up with an ad yeah I'm just waiting because I'm doing this so I'm not busy now I'm a bit busy maybe in the future maybe in the next coming month and so eventually I've done this with a city which I'm not going to name but it's been like a less than a year and they still haven't done anything so technically they have a branch there but it's not really active so it's very easy to be part of city AI and have your name on the website but it's not easy to be active and to start doing things so that's a big difference could you give us the URL or a link to this what do you have? city.ai, if you want I'll go back to the URL so it's city.ai, that's the website for city AI and then from there it allows all the different cities and check what branch it will have or something and now I'd like to say one thing we started doing these projects within city AI so different cities are collaborating on let's say initiatives or projects one project that I'm currently working on or maybe leading is the education initiative because like I said we were one of the first people that started doing technical workshops and everyone else liked the idea and wanted to do the same so now we're curating the workshops, materials and boot camps and training instructors city AI certifies so they can give these workshops in their cities and we're also working on some collaboration that I can't say it yet because it's not finalized but basically we're working on bringing AI education to everywhere, all over the world through this network of city AI apps who is the organizer of city AI? so they have two co-founders one that is named like but without an A like my name and the other is called Mike I can send you their names but is that an organization or they are just an individual? no it's an organization, it's an NGO that's in the Netherlands yeah it's an organization are they affiliated to some universities, institutions just by themselves? one of them works at the VC the other works at IBM also the VC branch they work with a lot of startups they are connected a lot and they're also the co-founders for the World Summit AI I'm not sure if you've heard of it it's the AI conference that happens every year in Amsterdam, the World Summit AI so city AI is also part of the organizing team so yeah so what do you think is there interest in growing this ecosystem are they trying to find new startups or not really but they're trying to basically connect everything and try to the slogan is enable everyone to apply AI the city AI is slogan so they want to help everyone be enforced and democratize AI because there's a lot of people that are doing a lot of things in AI but some other places all over the world that don't have access to the same resources and knowledge so they try to democratize this by building this decentralized house and everyone is connected through this so we share resources, we share models, we share stuff so it's easier to everyone should have a chance to be part of this have you had experience in any of your gatherings of people participating who are skeptical of the use of AI yes but not much sometimes I hear people saying some negative things like AI can I don't know it can be used for the rules or for the bad or whatever I mean yeah some people share this they always tell them that for me I think AI is technology just like any other technology and it's about how we use this technology that basically affects people so I'm not saying that AI cannot be used for bad but I mean it's the people who are bad in order to get this bad that's my opinion what do you think well I this ideally I would hope that the conversation would go deeper to play out some scenarios on how it constrains experience or our conduct or intrudes on privacy and what are ways of addressing those challenges yeah I agree it's not something that you can discuss in two minutes it's definitely a huge discussion do those happen those deeper conversations not really one time we had a discussion panel event but it was focused more on how our ecosystem in Lebanon can benefit from AI and we can try to reproduce the same environment setting as for example other places so what do we need to be able to compete with for example not Silicon Valley but like other cities that are doing some things like what's missing what don't we have that we need to work on to create so that we can get people like create more of a project and move forward thank you have you organized some sessions or even other schools not yet but that's awesome so next year we have two goals one of them like I said is to try to reach out to non-technical people and have workshops for them the other thing is to go to schools and have content for school so we also need to reach but I mean we're a limited team and we're also working on a volunteer basis so all of us have jobs or university and we'll do this so can you imagine that takes a lot of time to prepare some things and we're a little bit slow but hopefully next year we'll grow a bit more and try to reach to school that's good do you know about Kodar Dojo? no that's about teaching coding to children yeah that can be something like that teaching AI to children for free yeah so there's a lot of interested in Lebanon that teaches to either school kids or universities or basically anyone and we always try not to complete with them because that's not the point so we need to complement them so all of our courses or workshops require basic coding skills so that's why we don't teach you coding you should know how to code but we teach you Python for data science for example if you don't know Python and we teach you everything else that you need to know so going to the school kids obviously we will need to teach them not coding but I think after that I would check this Kodar Dojo okay thank you what are the criteria of getting through the workshops like do you need a technical background? yeah technical workshops are technical so you need to know basic programming that's it and some linear algebra nothing too advanced because we weren't so all of our workshops have been in the workshops because everyone in the community is still like a beginner and no one knows a lot so I really wanted to do some advanced things but I mean no one will show up so at least we said let's this year focus on introductory workshops and then hopefully by next year enough people will have the basic level so they can start attending a bit more advanced things and now I think tomorrow's event went well we're hoping to do some online workshops as well so you can put them on YouTube and then if you're not let's say if you're a beginner we tell you go ahead watch this workshop follow the code or whatever and then if you pass this you can attend this more advanced workshop so it's a way to raise the level of the community technical skills thank you what are the main sectors or domains of AI because AI's value comes when it supplies like IT obviously so in Lebanon and in the world what are the main let's say e-commerce you mentioned earlier healthcare maybe whatever so in Lebanon I think most of it is either so recommendation system is one thing because it's the easiest in my opinion I think it's easy and we have a lot of e-commerce websites and a lot of people doing these things and second thing is insurance I know a lot of insurance companies because remember you have to have a lot of data and usually huge companies like insurance companies have a lot of data and can invest and invest in a project because when you're doing an AI project it's not like a couple of weeks and then you see results it's a bit of a long-term investment so you need to be able to 6 months to start seeing some results and I think everyone can afford to do this but huge companies in Lebanon can that's my experience in the world I think it's really diverse I mean you have a lot of computer vision applications and stuff that are happening and a few things by the way chatbot is another application in Lebanon that uses a bit of an LP whereas do you know something about it thanks what are your long-term goals with the Baywood AI I still have a little the AI hub of the region so we have a lot of people that know how to implement and work with data science or AI in this project I really want people to stay in Lebanon not to leave to find jobs so a lot of smart people if you're let's say smart and you want to work with data science or AI there's no opportunities in Lebanon now so we really have to leave so I really want them to have opportunities I want companies to start using AI creating opportunities so we can keep smart people in Lebanon and give them opportunities there's also a huge outsourcing opportunity as well so there's not enough companies that can hire people it's always fine because if you have the talent you can always work with remote companies this is something I've been doing for the past four years I've been working as a freelancer or consultant on my own based on this technology because I couldn't find Lebanese companies that are looking for as a scientist or whatever so I had to look abroad so I was like that's what I see and it worked so well a lot of companies it's much easier for them and cheaper to hire let's say someone from Lebanon or from this area instead of you know a lot of taxes there so that's also part of the long term to try to post that with the ecosystem and second, do you have sponsors like because I assume you have some expenditures if you don't we don't have sponsors so I try to make it sustainable so we have paid events so our workshops are $15 per person which covers the cost of the pizza and we get something a bit left for the community so I try to charge as little as possible to basically give a good experience and as well keep something for the community I'm trying to look for sponsors but it's a lot of hard work I'm not sure how to work focus on the community it's sad because sometimes a sponsor comes with its own demands and its own things I don't want to really change I don't want to keep the price of the community intact so if a person aligns with the sponsor then I don't need to sponsor I can just make it happen can you say pizza? yes should it be Zata in Lebanon? no actually pizza is a huge popular thing especially it's the technical workshop so usually colders like to eat pizza so you can see that we have time for other workshops now we're thinking about if we started doing online workshops then what should we do with the pizza so one funny idea was we get them coupons for free pizza but again that's a little way so you didn't understand correctly so to risk more data science talent in Lebanon than jobs? not yet not yet he was asking me about the long term goal so I told him that my goal is to to create a community of data scientists people who can work with this technology people who can stay in Lebanon and who can either create startups or work at companies in this field but I said one argument is that Lebanon is small it's true and there's not a lot of companies in Lebanon so then if all the jobs were fulfilled then what about the rest of the people so I told him that there's another option which is the outsourcing opportunity and this has started to happen by the way a lot of European companies have come to Lebanon and started to create people in Lebanon no one in data science yet because there's no talent but basically our goal is to produce talent so next month we have our first AI bootcamp and the idea of this bootcamp is going to happen like multiple times per year and every person that graduates from this bootcamp should be able to find a job or work in data science and one more question probably I missed because I was dead I'm sorry is your activity somehow connected to universities or are there university professors who are interested in this topic so it's like completely the team behind AI with five people three of us four of us are from the university they're from AUB, American University of Israel and one of them is doing PhD two are doing their masters the fourth is just younger so we are connected to some professors at universities but nothing like official or part of the community but we do have some connection if at some point you want to get into the deeper topics in your courses are there people from the university who can contribute or this knowledge does not exist yes yes so one time we had an event around NLP and it was specifically NLP in Arabic and so we brought a professor from AUB who is working on NLP in Arabic so he gave us the he's a big fan of the community he always encourages us he likes what we're doing so we had some interest but no one is fully on board and always part of the team we do have some support ok thank you