News

The annual Alem Cup 2023 programming championship began on September 8. It is organized by alem school with support from the Astana Hub international technology park. Participants compete for cash prizes by creating bots that battle other players in a computer game. People of any age and background can take part.

The prize pool is:

• 1st place: 1,000,000 tenge
• 2nd place: 700,000 tenge
• 3rd place: 400,000 tenge

Your code will run every 15 minutes against code from participants at a similar skill level. A win adds ranking points and a loss removes them. A new ranking is formed after each round of arena games. The three highest-ranked players advance to the final.

Supported programming languages: Python, C++, JS, Go, Pascal, Java, PHP, C, C#, Ruby, Kotlin, Blockly.

The championship runs until October 12.

Registration

The 24th International Conference on Digital Signal Processing (DSP2023) took place in Greece this summer, featuring papers on digital signal processing and machine learning. DSML KZ members Zangar Yermaganbet @goofymonarch and @Ayana_Mussabayeva, together with NU professors, presented a paper on a double-input CNN used in spelling systems for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

A P300 Speller flashes symbols on a screen. When the user sees the symbol they want to type light up, it is treated as the target response. The task becomes binary classification: either the signal is a target and the user wants to type the highlighted symbol, or it is not.

The authors generate two types of spectrograms from EEG brain signals using independent component analysis and the Fourier transform, then pass the spectrograms through a double-input CNN.

The reported results show that the method is more effective than classical classifiers used in BCI systems, such as SVM and LDA.

The full paper is openly available on ResearchGate.

Date Talk: Attention Is All You Need

Source: arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

September 3, 18:00. Venue: Jimmy Yamazaki's stream at twitch.tv/yamazakij

Speaker: Jimmy Yamazaki

About the talk: We will examine the paper and its mechanisms in detail, try to understand how and why attention works, dive deep into transformer architecture, write code, and even train models on small datasets. You can ask questions throughout the talk, and the speaker will be happy to answer them.

VeriMeet — September 8 | 13:30 | Almaty | SmART.Point coworking space

• Andrey Shadrikov, R&D Team Lead at Verigram. “There will be improvements: building communication in high-risk products.”
• Radmir Kadyrov, Computer Vision Engineer at Verigram. “Easy to see: challenges in quality assessment for facial video analytics.”
• Anton Maltsev, Lead ML Engineer at ArtiSight and Rembrain. “Detection: YOLO or not anymore?”
• Dmitry Gordin, Computer Vision Engineer at Citix. “Cooking computer vision to production-done.”
• Aigerim Kambetbayeva, ML Specialist at Cybernet. “The journey from zero to 3 million dialogues per month in two years.”
• Kirill Markin, Lead Data Scientist at Ozma and SOAX. “Migrating to the ‘right’ ClickHouse cluster: managing one billion new records daily.”

Participation is free.

Registration is required.