Workshop feedbacks from the participants of the AI & ML workshop on 31 Aug 2019 organized by IESA are now available. A summary of the key findings from the IESA feedback survey is provided below. If you wish to provide more specific feedback to E-Vidya directly, on this or any other E-Vidya workshop, you are most welcome to use this feedback form.
42 out of 54 respondents rated the knowledge imparted at 4 or higher.
47 out of 54 respondents rated the instructor 4 or higher.
47 out of 54 respondents rated the workshop as highly relevant to their learning needs.
51 out of 54 respondents rated the program registration experience 4 or higher. The dedicated IESA officers and staff make this possible.
48 out of 54 respondents came to know about the workshop from IESA electronic communications or from their employers who are IESA members.
21 out of 42 respondents showed interest in longer 3-5 day workshops with hands-on learning sessions.
34 out of 52 respondents expressed interest in attending workshops like this once every quarter.
Reflections as Instructor of the Workshop
A fair number of participants thought that the content coverage was too intense for a 1-day workshop. I have to admit that as instructor I was entirely aware of this - the intended coverage of topics was truly formidable for a 1-day workshop. We overshot the scheduled time for the workshop by over 1.5 hours and we were delightfully surprised that a large majority of such a large audience chose to stay on (on a beautiful Saturday evening) until we completed almost all the key topics.
To a large extent this content overload was a deliberately taken risk. Since this was the first offering of this workshop on AI&ML, we wanted to get a sense of the topics that got more audience attention. Based upon the experience of this workshop, we have fine-tuned the content for future workshops. Also, the broader perspective covered in this workshop was intended to lay down the background prerequisite for the upcoming multi-day AI&ML workshops with extensive hands-on learning of the most effective ML models and techniques.
Detailed professional demographic information on participants was not collected in the feedback survey, however, as the instructor, I collected a few basic aggregate informations (by quick show of hands by the participants) at the start of the workshop. The profile mix of the participants was by and large in line with our expectations. A majority of the audience had little prior background in AI and ML or in advanced optimization algorithms. A large majority of the audience consisted of technical professionals, but the audience also included senior managers, start-up founders and executives, pure hardware or ASIC engineers, and at least one intellectual property legal professional. I shall peg my estimate of the professional experience spread of the participants from 3 years to 30 years with a majority concentrated in the 8-15 years range.
Overall, this workshop was a delightful experience for me as instructor and I hope to make future workshops on AI&ML and other deep technology topics even more enjoyable for participants. Thanks IESA for organizing this workshop.