Ylab and A.I. North team up: Python crash course on Sept 20

Ylab member Lucian has been running the Artificial Intelligence North meetups for the last couple of years at Markham Public Libraries’ Angus Glen branch. He’s had an incredible variety of quality speakers and topics  – machine learning, neural networks and more. Click on the link to see for yourself.

The meetups have been managed from ylab’s meetup.com account. To allow us to do even more, we’re decided to bring it all to ylab’s home at the David Dunlap Observatory.

Hosting the events in our maker space will give us more flexibility on duration of events, as the library closes at 9 PM.

To prove it, we’re kicking off A.I. North’s fall season with our Python crash course for programmers. It will run from 7 PM to 10 PM on Thursday, September 20, 2018.

Python has become a dominant language for A.I. development and we want to get everyone interested through the basics. We’re hoping to do a lot more with it and some of the major A.I. toolkits in future sessions.

This is not a beginner’s programming course. We are targeting people who already know how to program, so we’ll be going quickly in to the features of the language. It’s a lot to do in 3 hours, but we’ve done it before and everyone got through it.

It’s a hands-on course, where everyone should come with the language pre-loaded on their laptop. We’ll be covering:

• Basic structure for both procedural and object oriented usage of the language
• Structure and use of libraries
• The major data structures
• Basic database access libraries – with a Postgres server to test!
• Basic web access

It’s a lot to cover in three hours – but that’s the beauty of Python. If you already have some programming skills, you can move fast. 

As always at ylab, we’ll be putting up the sample code and any slides on the web after the class.

We are charging a small fee for this event, and you can register here. Because, like, we pay rent for our space. We’ll have some cookies and beverages for the break. Spots are limited. Breaking news: we just listed the event, and it’s already half sold out before we finished writing this post! Our last class also sold out.

Big thanks from both A.I. North and ylab to  Markham Public Libraries. They generously hosted events to help both groups get started, and we’ve co-operated on maker days and their excellent PechaKucha series. We look forward to working with them in the future.