At the end of June, Howest University of Applied Sciences in Bruges, Belgium, held its first ever AI Summer Camp, organized in collaboration with the popular Security Summer Camp, bringing together 35 talented students from various countries, including Canada, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
Students from participating schools gathered in the beautiful city-center of Bruges for a week of intensive training and real-life exercises in machine learning, deep learning, data processing, and some exciting social activities.
At the end of the week, on June 30, Oracle Academy was invited to host an exclusive, hands-on workshop, giving the students the opportunity to delve into fascinating topics such as data analytics in sports and the Smart Forest project. As a bonus they got try out the exciting technology themselves.
The workshop was handled by Bob Peulen, Data Science Technical Specialist at Oracle, with support from his colleague Tom Bailliu, Principal Account Cloud Engineer.
Bob first taught the students all about data-driven successes in sports such as SailGP, the Premier League, and of course Oracle Red Bull Racing. Bob explained how the partnership with Red Bull Racing is driven by data and how Oracle’s technology is involved in race strategy, young driver development, engine development and fan experience.
He also touched upon the story of NIBIO (The Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research) and the SmartForest Project that uses Oracle Cloud to foster sustainability. NIBIO is analyzing data taken from drones, robots and lasers that scan Norway’s forests and deliver the information to forestry experts working hard to protect the forests for generations to come.
After this interesting presentation, the students were invited to try out the technology themselves. In a hands-on lab they learned how to create their own deep learning model in OCI Data Science to diagnose pneumonia in chest x-ray images of patients. They used a custom deep learning image classification model and they applied transfer learning techniques on a pre-trained model to adapt to this task. Finally, they deployed their model for usage by third-party applications.
The difficulty increased after the workshop as the students participated in a challenge to improve the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that they had just configured in the workshop. The student with the highest score of accuracy went home with a nice prize.
All in all, it was a successful event. A big thank you goes to everyone who participated and helped make it a success, and most of all to the students who travelled to Bruges and participated!
Interested in the Oracle Academy program and what it can do for you and your students? Learn more and join at academy.oracle.com.