Discover hidden tech talent and AI/ML projects & jobs at companies

Hello! Welcome to Marct AI, a newsletter by Alex Ker (me) and hopefully many future contributors!

I previously worked at TKS, Neurable, and MIT in machine learning, research, and growth. Currently, I’m a fellow at Unshackled Ventures, Bessemer VP, and Bloomberg Beta.

Motivations

In early 2019, I founded P-ai.org (the modern incubator for AI projects and ideas) at the 7 College Claremont Consortium, to-date incubating a total of 16 projects with 200+ members to provide basic AI education through workshops, events, peer-led projects, matched 7 students with companies/research opportunities during the pandemic, becoming one of the most active networks on campus.

I realized startups and SMEs are working on equally cool if not cooler problems compared to bigger companies. I saw friends and awesome talent having a hard time standing out in their job search.

This Newsletter

This newsletter is an effort to help hidden and untraditional talent + companies working on AI/ML to discover each other.

Every week, I’ll be featuring a 3 up-and-coming AI practitioners and 3 companies that I find inspiring. 1 sentence on what they do and 1 on what they are looking for. I’ll also occasionally share my thoughts on trends, actionable tips that worked for me when finding opportunities, and new models to try out!

Without further ado, here is this week’s talent and companies…

First Edition

I hosted a fireside chat 🚀 on entrepreneurship, venture, and AI this week. I spoke with Ron Sege (BGV Partner), Minn Kim (Bloomberg Beta Principal), Eyal Cohen (Spark AI CTO) on topic such as: how to start your own startup, fundraising, market trends, opportunities, bleeding-edge applications with early-stage investors and entrepreneurs.

Full event Recording Link

Top takeaways:

• Trends to watch: Creativity (art, fiction), NLP, ML tooling is maturing and giving way to applied use-cases, cloud native and infrastructure optimization, cybersecurity, marketing, sales.

• Two types of problems to solve:

  • Work in new architecture and compute (pushing the state-of-the-art research)

  • Applied - looking to improve business problem and outcomes.

• Eyal on starting a company: Start with a problem, and apply AI/ML to it; focus on the business problem to get the company to market faster; the problem you start with may not be the one you end up with; pick the right time (for the market).

• Minn and Ron on investing: Build domain expertise; VCs look for the composition of the team, passion, articulation; want to see outlier ambition and pursuing ideas at the intersection of what’s possible and what the market needs.

• Parting advice for college students: Do more interesting projects on your free-time, cultivate your network and meet interesting people, cold email everyone!

Talent 👩🏼‍💻 (reach them directly via links!)

1. Marcos Acosta, computer science major with experience leading technical teams at scale, computer vision, NLP; seeking summer 2022 technical opportunities.

2. Stefanos Stoikos, a computer science major currently working as R&D engineer at Ferryhopper, published NLP paper at COLLING2020; seeking summer 2021 technical opportunities.

3. Alexandra Werner, cognitive science and linguistics major with previous experience in UI/UX research, digital marking, consulting; seeking summer 2021 opportunities related to AI/ML operations (non-technical).

Projects & Companies 🌇 (if you decide to apply, mention you saw it on the Marct AI newsletter!)

1. Aquafort is building the platform for predicting and automating aquaculture using computer vision and data analytics in real-time; hiring full-time Machine Learning Engineer; reach them at https://aquafort.ai/contact/.

2. TensoAI is enabling greenhouses to share high-quality, secure, private data by privacy-preserving ML techniques like federated learning; hiring full-time or part-time Machine Learning Engineer with experience in privacy; reach Ramen (CEO) at [email protected].

3. Kinside (YC 18) is a managed marketplace between parents, childcare providers, and employers. They are looking to integrate recommendations and applying a slew of models to a growing dataset; apply to the Backend/Full Stack Software Engineer position here!

I welcome any feedback. If you want to be featured in a future edition as talent or as a company, please fill out the talent interest form or company interest form. Please email [email protected] if you have any questions, or want to chat!

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