Climbing that deep learning hill, for METIS in the Netherlands
On 30 July 2019 deepkapha.ai delivered a talk to METIS in the Netherlands, mapping the route from aspiring data scientist to working professional across five skill plateaus.
The engagement is filed as METIS and dated 30 July 2019. The talk was given in the Netherlands. Its title slide reads "Climbing that deep learning hill", with the subtitle "from aspiring data scientist to full fledged data professional" and the line "The Netherlands, July 2019". Eighteen slides, exported to PDF the same day it was delivered.
Tarry Singh opened on the talent problem. A slide on Siren Servers set up the claim that internet companies are amassing talent while enterprises are left data poor and talent poor. The next slide answered it: talent exists, and deepkapha.ai had been meeting it while training people in deep learning inside enterprises and in boot camps. What was missing was a route.
The spine of the talk is a five-plateau climb. Plateau 1 is fundamentals: linear algebra, statistics, probability, programming. Plateau 2 is data visualisation and big data tooling. Plateau 3 is machine learning: regression, clustering, sampling, classification. Plateau 4 is deep learning, drawn as a dense cluster of CNNs, RNNs, autoencoders, GANs, deep reinforcement learning and capsule networks, with a footnote on the generative models that were new that summer: GLOW, BERT, GPT-2, XLNet, ERNIE 2.0. Plateau 5 is applied AI. Each plateau carries a completion percentage, 25, 34, 55, 74, 100, so a learner can place themselves on the slope rather than in a job title.
The last three slides looked past the market as it stood. One mapped roles the brain sciences might create: intention decoding engineer, dream imaging recording specialist, artificial retina implant engineer, neuro imaging and brain atlas specialist. Another did the same for space: space traffic controller, on-orbit refuelling specialist, Mars colony psychologist, space data scientist. Most of the space cells simply read "coming up".
A longer version of the same deck survives in the folder, saved two days earlier on 28 July. It ran to 32 slides and carried the commercial material: blended learning tracks, a skills scorecard, a skills evolution matrix, cost and time curves, an enterprise section. The version delivered on 30 July dropped all of it. Eighteen slides went to the room and none of them was a sales slide.
No publishable photography survives from this session, so this chapter rests on the deck and the correspondence around it.
