It was a Sunday March 11th, 2018, the journey I am not working and I especially do not prefer that it does by without any activity as usual I do.

I was not really very familiar with some new words like the artificial intelligence and despite that, I woke very early as I reserved my place to be present for the for 8 hours of "DeepHack - AI Hackathon organized by Facebook Developer Circle in Tunis" in partnership with Cogite Coworking Space and InstaDeep.

I arrived to CCS at early 7 am, this space is a hub for impact-driven, entrepreneurial individuals and organizations that would like to actively contribute to sustainable development in Tunisia. I started checking for my registration for the right to attend the event.

Tunisian youth coders start arriving within the hour and are ready for a long day to break the challenges with goals in their minds. Students, professionals and curious people like me were here do discover the adventure for the world of the AI Hackathon.

A graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at NYU’s Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. He is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wider audience.

Karim helps companies getting a grip on the latest AI advancements and implementing them. A graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at NYU's Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics.

This led him to co-found InstaDeep, an AI startup that was nominated at the MWC17 for the Top 20 global startup list made by PCMAG. Karim uses TensorFlow to develop Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning products.
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Karim is also the founder of the TensorFlow Tunis Meetup. He regularly organises educational events and workshops to share his experience with the community. Karim is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wide audience.

In the event were approximately about more fifty person coming from different fields, but the most of them are students and the rest just are here to discover more for the artificial intelligence for limited time of this challenge to 8 hours working on to get the right solution at the highest scores during the full competition that participants are required to build a model that predicts the hourly taxi ride demand in New York City based on Population Census Blocks (CT2010).

One account per participant: You cannot sign up to Kaggle from multiple accounts and therefore you cannot submit from multiple accounts.
No private sharing outside teams: Privately sharing code or data outside of teams is not permitted. It's okay to share code if made available to all participants on the forums.
Team Mergers: Team mergers are not allowed in this competition.
Team Limits: There is no maximum team size.
Submission Limits: You may submit a maximum of 5 entries per day.
You may select up to 2 final submissions for judging.
Competition TimelineStart Date: 11/03/2018 9:00 AM Tunis Time
Entry Deadline: 11/03/2018 7:00 PM Tunis Time
End Date: 11/03/2018 7:00 PM Tunis Time

Now it's time to the deadline, and the 15 teams - 30 competitors should have to finish their time or they would be necessarily blocked from the system and no matter what scores they have gotten all along the journey. I noticed on their faces at the end of the challenges that are stressed and not like the early morning, they were smiling, laughing but then things changed to something serious.

On March 10 and 11, 2018, I'm really honored to be invited this weekend to to learn more from Tunisian developers and to meet people working at Facebook that they will be coming especially US to the Artificial Intelligence hackathon opening day ceremony organized by the Facebook Developer Circle in partnership with Cogite Coworking Space and InstaDeep, where two challenges will happen at the same time:

1- Machine Learning/Deep Learning Challenge: This challenge will be targeting beginners to intermediates in the field.
2- Decision Making/Reinforcement Learning Challenge: This challenge will be targeting intermediates to advanced in the field.

And during this event I will meet with two special guests coming from Facebook Menlo Park, just to meet the Tunisian developers, and are:

Developer Programs Analyst at Facebook. Alivia is a computer scientist and an avid independent learner. Alivia will be talking to us about Big Data and Analytics.

Graduate of MIT Sloan School of Management, and the head of the Developer Circles program at Facebook, Matt will give us an insight on the Facebook annual conference, F8, as well as on the Developer Circles program.

Registration is now open for F8, the Facebook annual developer conference. Join the event on May 1 & 2 in San Jose, CA to learn about the latest technologies and interact with the developer community.