With data science being a relatively new field, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the number of resources available online. We often hear about data science enthusiasts kick-starting their journey with online content but that’s only enough to teach you the basics in this field. This is where meetups come in handy. As online learning can also be a disjointed experience, data science meetups offer an excellent opportunity for networking and hands-on skills building sessions for aspiring professionals.

• Data science meetups offer an excellent opportunity to mingle with industry experts and professionals to understand the kind of skills required to get a headstart in any company
• Data science has a broader scope and a lot of people from non-computer science backgrounds also want to make a career in this buzzing field. Attending tech meetups gives one an excellent chance to snag a one-on-one with an industry veteran and understand how to realign current skill set.
• Data Science meetups is a great opportunity for freshly trained analytics professionals to get referrals for jobs, land paid or unpaid internships with industries or even understand how to further their education.
• Hands-on workshops on R or Python are very useful, especially at a beginner’s level

Top 5 New Tech Meetups You Can Attend To Upskill And Network

1) AIMinds: An initiative by Analytics India Magazine, AIMinds is a monthly meetup geared to promote artificial intelligence development in India. AIMinds brings some of the most well-known AI practitioners and researchers from India to exchange ideas, share knowledge and help budding professionals to make a career in this field. The first edition, held in Bengaluru was helmed by Monis Khan, CEO at Datoin, Hindol Basu, CEO at Actify Data Labs and Subramanian MS, head of Analytics at Bigbasket. The speakers addressed one of the biggest concerns — Switching To A Career In Data science and Building Domain-specific Data Science Products. The recently concluded second edition on Demystifying Data Science was held at ISB, Hyderabad and was headed by Vikas Agarwal, senior principal data scientist at Oracle, Bhat Dittakavi, serial tech entrepreneur and Joy Mustafi, principal applied scientist at Microsoft AI & Research and Koteswararao Chilakala, technical lead at LVPEI Center for Innovation.

How to Join: If you are keen on attending the next session, click here to join the Meetup group.

2) Ml-India Forum: Machine Learning India forum, kick-started by entrepreneur and researcher Varun Aggarwal, co-founder and CTO of Aspiring Minds, is an ML focused platform. It was started to foster a buzzing ML community in India by bringing together companies, academic institutions, startups and students together under one banner. ML-India is a veritable source of information on India’s ML contribution in terms of research papers or output. The forum also drums up timely analysis on ML-related conferences in India. So far, the forum has organized 27 ML meetups and featured 146 ML professionals on their platform. Their meetups are mostly hands-on sessions on topics such as Sentiment Analysis of tweets or an Introduction to NLP and even entail discussion of applications of simple ML algorithms.

How to Join: Students or professionals interested in attending the event can join the group to get regular updates. Click here to subscribe for their updates.

3) Pune AI Meetup: Intended for mostly first timers, this Pune-based meetup organised by Prashant Sahu has held 12 meetups so far. Aimed at students and engineering graduates who want to learn more about AI, ML, deep learning and its industry applications, the meetups tackle some core industry topics such as AI and Computer Vision, Image and Video Processing, Data and Text Mining, NLP, ML and Deep Learning and IoT, among other topics. The programming language used is mostly Python, Java and MATLAB.

How to join: If you are interested in a particular technical topic, you can write to them. Click here to join the Meetup.

4) Delhi AI and Deep Learning by H2O: This group, going strong with over 3,100 members is organised by H2O.ai, the leading open source ML platform which is transforming the use of AI. In fact, more than 12,600 companies leverage H2O’s open source platform for mission-critical applications across finance, healthcare, retail, insurance, sales and marketing. The AI and Deep Learning-focused group brings the latest information on AI, ML, deep learning and discusses trending topics and also helps participants in using their open source platform better.

How to join: If you are interested in joining the group, click here.  

5) #chAI by Pi Ventures: #chAI by AI-focused fund pi Ventures is a meetup geared to promote peer-to-peer learning and discussions with stakeholders and startup community. For this particular initiative, International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is a member of the World Bank, partnered with pi Ventures to bring discussions around AI, ML and build a strong community. According to Manish Singhal, founding partner of pi Ventures, #chAI is geared towards AI startups and there are focused sessions on technology. The backing from IFC will help to draw more participants from India and across the globe. So far the group has held eight meetups.

How to join: This meetup group is mostly geared towards startups and stakeholders and is small, intimate gathering over tea. If you are interested, click here to join the mailing list.