“AI for Ukraine” is a series of workshops and lectures held by international artificial intelligence experts to support the development of Ukraine’s tech community during the war. Yoshua Bengio (MILA/U. Montreal), Alex J. Smola (Amazon Web), Sebastian Bubeck (Microsoft), Gaël Varoquaux (INRIA), and many other well-known specialists have joined the initiative. This is a non-commercial educational project by AI HOUSE –  a company focused on building the AI/ML community in Ukraine and is part of the Roosh tech ecosystem. All proceeds collected upon registration will be donated to the biggest Ukrainian charity fund “Come Back Alive”. 

It’s been five months of a completely new reality for every single Ukrainian, one with sirens, bombings, pain, and war. The AI community has also changed a lot, with many now on the front line, and others dedicated to volunteer work. One thing for certain, this war will end with Ukraine’s victory after which the country will need to be rebuilt in every aspect. 

"War is one of the most tragic types of collective human behavior, and democracy is a defense against tyranny and the key to improving people's lives. It is essential to maintain and develop the flame of research and knowledge even in such a dark period, thinking about the post-war times and the importance of science and innovation to achieve progress." – comments Yoshua Bengio, famous computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 2018 and is called as one of the “Godfathers of AI”.

The global AI community has been and is continuing to actively support Ukraine and its tech sector. The “AI for Ukraine” project is aimed at connecting international experts with the local AI community, sharing insight, and helping Ukraine on its journey of becoming Europe’s AI hub in the near future.

"Ukraine must continue its path to a modern democratic country, economically prosperous, with free and educated people. Supporting the AI ​​community in Ukraine will contribute to the development of the economy, increasing the value of local talent." – adds Gaël Varoquaux, ML-researcher and data scientist.

AI for Ukraine aims to:

• Provide Ukrainian talents with access to quality education in artificial intelligence
• Collect funds to support the Ukrainian people
• Involve global AI leaders in the development of the Ukrainian AI community
• Strengthen ties and expand the network of Ukrainian and international specialists

"In the Roosh ecosystem, AI HOUSE is responsible for developing educational programs and network-building that helped to implement the AI for Ukraine initiative.

We develop artificial intelligence in Ukraine in all aspects, the most fundamental of which is education. Education is the foundation and driving force for every professional who seeks success. Thus, our goal of creating this initiative is primarily to provide access to unique knowledge from the best experts in the industry. We gathered world-renowned specialists that are keen to help Ukraine and its AI community. Together, we will be able to promote the field of artificial intelligence in Ukraine at a qualitatively new level and form conditions for the further development of technological talents." - emphasizes Serhii Tokarev, Founding Partner at Roosh.

Speakers

 
Professors from Stanford, Cornell, Berkeley, and other renowned educational institutions, along with engineers and specialists from leading IT companies like Amazon, Samsung AI, Microsoft, Hugging Face have all joined to support the initiative and host educational sessions. 

Yoshua Bengio – Professor at the University of Montreal, founder and scientific director of the Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence, head of the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program, and one of the leading experts in the field of AI. In 2019, Yoshua was awarded the prestigious Killam Prize and in 2022, became the computer scientist with the highest h-index in the world. He is most known for his pioneering work in deep learning, earning him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

Alex J. Smola – VP of machine learning at Amazon Web Services, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the world's top experts in the field of machine learning. Alex is also a prolific and widely cited author in the academic research community, having authored and contributed to nearly 500 papers.

Sebastien Bubeck – Sr.Principal Research Manager, leads the Machine Learning Foundations group at Microsoft Research Redmond. He has won several awards at machine learning conferences for his work on online decision making, convex optimization, and adversarial robustness.

Gaël Varoquaux – Research director working on data science and health at Inria (French Computer Science National research). His research focuses on statistical-learning tools for data science and scientific inference. He co-founded scikit-learn, one of the reference machine-learning toolboxes, and helped build various central tools for data analysis in Python. 

How to Participate

 
The educational sessions are available to all and can be accessed via the AI for Ukraine website. Upon registration, participants will be required to make a deposit of any amount ($1 minimum) to receive full access to all upcoming lectures and workshops. All collected funds will be donated to Ukraine’s largest charity fund comebackalive.in.ua.

Format and Topics

 
In a series of online lectures and workshops, speakers will cover current AI topics. Some of the topics that will be covered in the hands-on workshops are compression of models for deep learning, AutoML, evaluation of machine learning models and their diagnostic value and much more.
Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions, interact with the lectures, and join discussions. 

The first lecture will be held on the 17th of August with Yoshua Bengio talking about "Bridging the gap between current deep learning and higher-level human cognitive abilities”.

About AI HOUSE

 
AI HOUSE is the AI ​​community in Ukraine that brings together talents, experts, and investors and provides quality education in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We research the most exciting and prospective vectors of AI and ML and establish a partnership with key stakeholders locally and worldwide.

About Roosh

 
Roosh is a Ukrainian company that creates and invests in AI and ML-focused projects. Its business-ecosystem is composed of venture studio Pawa, venture firm Roosh Ventures, Ukrainian AI/ML community AI HOUSE, tech university SET University, and startups Reface and ZibraAI. Roosh aims to build Ukraine as the European center for artificial intelligence.

 
aiforukraine.aihouse.club
Point of contact: Maryna Chernysh - PR Manager at Roosh (mc@roosh.tech)