As a Professional Speaker, I get invited or engaged for a talk by many (OK, let’s say a few!). Out of them, I try to excuse myself from agreeing to speak at private engineering colleges as I find their programs to be uninteresting and are organised only for showing numbers to the AICTE. Also, most of them are situated in the suburbs or in the neighbouring towns of Chennai, it takes me more than half-a-day to travel there and return. Disclosure: I studied my Bachelor in Engineering from a private college: SVCE, Pennalur.
Following my talk last month at Loyola College, Chennai on “AI & Transformation“, the Faculty of Computer Science at SRM University, Ramapuram Campus invited me to deliver a talk on “Career Opportunities in Artificial Intelligence“. This was a new topic for which I had to study and that interested me; also the campus was close to my residence, so I agreed. I was surprised by the on-time start of the seminar (9:15 A.M.) and by the interest shown by the 100 or so, Graduate and Post-Graduate students of Computer Science who attended.
The graduate and post-graduate CS students of SRM University, Ramapuram, Chennai
In today’s ubiquitous online era, there is no point in rehashing content that youngsters can get direct access from YouTube and other places. Instead, if you put in the time and energy to prepare a talk that is relevant and interesting, students will listen to you speak and you can hold their attention. I managed to do that today, with this bespoke presentation that I prepared from scratch for the students.
Download the slide-deck I presented on “Career Options in AI” (PDF)
- I started with a brief 3-slides introduction to “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning” -anything more would’ve felt like preaching to the pope – then I moved on to a coding example using OpenAI’s GPT2 to generate a new review after the system has learned from the hundreds of past movie reviews in my blog.
- Then I moved on to a few examples from WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com on the job roles that are likely to replaced by AI, what is at risk and those that are safe.
- Explained the 5 to 6 major job roles in AI & Data Science for which companies are recruiting around the world, including AI Scientist, AI Scale Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Data Labellers, and, Data Pipeline Engineer. These groupings were mine and meant to give students an indication of what are the roles, responsibilities and qualifications needed for each of them.
- In the next section, I presented a dozen real-world job openings in AI & Data Science posted by companies like Microsoft, Google India, Capgemini, Accenture, H2O.AI & Databricks. Fresh out of college, it may be difficult for the Engineering students to get these jobs, so I explained the roadmap they can work on.
- Finally, I gave them a guide on how they can start today to prepare for a career in AI & ML.
Venkatarangan talking on “Career Options in Artificial Intelligence” to the Engineering Students
The Dean Dr C Sundar presented me with this souvenir, I am wondering what I do with this?
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