Dive into the fundamentals of Neural Networks in this engaging, hands-on meetup! We’ll take you on a journey through the core concepts of how computers learn to recognize patterns, starting with simple neurons all the way to building practical Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). Whether you’re brand new to machine learning or already have experience, this session will help solidify your understanding of neural network basics.

Here’s our agenda for the day:

1. Welcome and Introduction (15 minutes)

• Meet the organizers and fellow attendees.
• Learn about the overall theme: “A Friendly Introduction to Neural Networks.”
• Get a brief overview of the major neural network architectures (MLP, CNN, RNN, LSTM).

• Historical Background: Trace the evolution from the perceptron in the 1950s to today’s deep learning boom.
• Conceptual Overview: Understand neurons, layers, activations, and how data flows forward and backward through a network.
• Why So Many Architectures?: Discover how CNNs, RNNs, and LSTMs cater to images, text, audio, and sequential data.

3. Deep Dive into Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) (60 minutes)

• Structure of MLPs: Break down the input, hidden, and output layers—and the importance of activation functions.
• Mathematical Foundations: Learn about forward propagation, backpropagation, gradient descent, and loss functions.
• Practical Examples: See a code snippet of a simple classification task using scikit-learn/Keras/pytorch.
• Regularization & Overfitting: A glimpse of dropout, L2 regularization, and early stopping.

By the end of this session, you’ll have a solid grasp of fundamental neural network concepts, feel confident about implementing basic MLPs, and be well on your way to tackling more advanced architectures. 

Don’t miss out on this chance to unlock the secrets of how computers learn—see you at the meetup!

Gigs:

We would love to reach out to you so that you can build for our customers, please fill out this form with details to ensure we have your details:

GIG/HACK DEVELOPER PORTFOLIO FORM

Join community channels:

Africa's Talking AI/ML Community:

• Join the Africa's Talking AI/ML Community here

Slack:

• Join Africa's Talking slack community here

Please follow our Twitter handle too:

• @AfricasTalking

You can get our videos, recaps, and event interviews on our YouTube channel, subscribe to get updates:

• Africa's Talking YouTube Channel

Africa's Talking community allows developers to learn skills for the modern-day African Developer. We are language and framework agnostic. All developers are welcome. This is where Africa's Talking developers community meets to build, learn and exchange knowledge.

We are helping software developers and businesses to bring their ideas to life through easy-to-use APIs easily.

Would you like to partner with us? Kindly contact the Developer Experience Team.