My Trip to AI

Welcome everyone! This is my first blog post! I am so excited to launch my blog and can not wait to share my work, my view, and my life with you guys!

I am an AI fan. With no doubt, Artificial Intelligence is rising exponentially. You probably discover in your life, you immerse yourself in AI products. But you probably are not going to learn the AI algorithms yourself.

Right, so why did I start to learn AI?

Before answering that, I would have to introduce myself and my background. I graduated from The University of Hong Kong and studied Risk Management and finance. And you should not be surprised that I worked in the financial services field for 7 years afterwards. During my years working in the financial industry, I observed that there were rapid changes in the industry with the introduction of new technology and the use of AI. For example, some insurance companies started to use mobile apps for insurance claims; many online investment platforms started to provide clean and easy tools for layman customers; many financial institutions started to use chatbots instead of humans to serve their customers. All of these automatic and human-less applications are innovative whilst at the same time challenging the traditional means of providing financial services.

It was 2018, triggered by the influx of financial technology (also known as Fintech) and the changes observed, I began to be curious about the magic behind the AI algorithms. Thanks to the rise of the MOOC platforms by that time, I started to learn AI from the online platform called Coursera. I taught myself the most fast-growing coding language of Python, dug into the details of the Python libraries like Pandas, Numpy, Tensorflow, Scikit-learn and Keras etc. I completed the whole Deep Learning Specialisation taught by the famous deep learning advocate Andrew Ng. The five courses including the mechanisms of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) were so inspiring and blew my mind.

In mid 2018, coincidentally, due to my wife’s job relocation, we moved from Hong Kong to London. It gave me the opportunity to stop and think thoroughly about my future and my career. It was a tough choice for a man in his early thirty to switch his career. But I decided to pick up the new challenge and learn more about AI.

In 2019, I picked up my school bag and did my Master degree in AI with City University of London. In the programme, we had plenty of opportunities to convert our ideas to practice. Of course, it was not easy! But the work provided us with opportunities to sharpen our knowledge and train our self-learning skills which was a very important element in AI study. To look back, this was absolutely the correct choice. The programme did not only open my eyes to the latest AI algorithms. But most importantly, I learnt the core value of it. I was able to make the prediction that the enormous future development of the AI industry is going to come.

It was late 2020, I finally graduated from my school with Distinction! I am still feeling so unrealistic! But I know it was only the very beginning of my AI trip. I started to carry out some small projects and kept learning new techniques!

Thank you for joining my Trip here! I would update my blog constantly with some new AI tech that attracted my eyeballs, my recent work, and, of course, my recent life.

Stay tuned!