Re:coded, Istanbul and Şanlıurfa

deepkapha.ai and Re:coded organised a series of workshops in Istanbul at Istanbul Bilgi University. In Turkish, bilgi means knowledge. It was a chance to meet the incoming and graduating cohorts across talks, lectures and coding sessions.

The second half was held in Şanlıurfa, known in ancient times as Edessa, a city of some 561,465 inhabitants near the Syrian border. The learners were as curious about the use and future of AI as they were enthusiastic about learning to code.

The Istanbul session was open to the public and Re:coded listed it on Facebook: a workshop on deep learning and AI, 19 March 2018, 18:30 to 20:00, at Istanbul Bilgi University's Kuştepe campus, room AKO. Nineteen people said they were going and twenty-nine marked themselves interested. The room that evening filled on two levels, laptops open along shared desks on the floor and more people watching from the mezzanine rail.

Şanlıurfa is about 1,100 km south-east of Istanbul and roughly fifty kilometres north of the Syrian border. On 20 March 2018 the programme took an auditorium at Harran University and filled it to the back rows. The stage carried Re:coded's boards and a printed date. The partner strip along the bottom of the banner ran Japan, the GAP regional development administration, UNDP, Istanbul Bilgi University, Re:coded and Harran University. Mobile app developers from the cohort presented their projects from that stage while the hall watched, phones up.

The teaching itself happened in an ordinary classroom with a whiteboard and a folding table. By the end the board carried the whole map: linear algebra and mathematics feeding statistics, open source ML, data analysis, applied AI in business, Naive Bayes and probability, with a worked tensor written out underneath. A second board traced convolutional networks back to Hubel and Wiesel, simple cells to complex to hypercomplex, and forward to 1990. A Re:coded roll-up stood by the door and a UNDP banner beside it.

The two cohort photographs in this chapter were not taken by anyone on assignment. Learners shot them on their own phones at the end of the session and sent them on. They reached the archive on 22 March 2018, the day after the teaching finished.

One correction to the record. This page has carried 18 March 2018. That is the date of the Facebook screenshot sitting in the archive, not the date of any of the work. The event listing, Re:coded's poster artwork and the printed banner on the Harran University stage all read otherwise: Istanbul on 19 March, Şanlıurfa on 20 March.