SPARK East to launch meetup series on artificial intelligence

The organizer of a new Ypsilanti meetup series on artificial intelligence (AI) says he'll welcome questions ranging from how to make AI work for a new business idea to "Is 'Terminator' going to happen?"

The series starts Tuesday, Jan. 24, at SPARK East. Organizer Adam Sypniewski says he wants the meetups to be a fun place to share ideas, foster collaborations, and address any and all machine learning-based questions.

"There is this vibrant startup culture in the Ann Arbor area," Sypniewski says. "I want to meet the people who have cool ideas out there. I want to introduce them to cool ideas and hopefully have something fun happen from this."

Sypniewski is an Ann Arbor resident and AI developer for Deepgram, a San Francisco-based "speech search" company that uses AI to transcribe, spot keywords, and get insights from phone calls, video footage, and online media.

"[If you] go to YouTube right now and enter your search keywords, the results that Google serves you are not based on the content of the video. They're based on the metadata, the title, or the description," Sypniewski says. "Deepgram could do something very similar, but we would search over the content. We could give you the results for that phrase, and when it was actually spoken."

Sypniewski got his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan, where he used machine learning to calculate distances between galaxies and also met Deepgram's founders. After school he did applied AI work for a defense contractor before joining Deepgram.

For the first meetup, Sypniewski plans to present a layman's introduction to AI and a survey of what's been happening in the field for the last 50 years. From there, he hopes to get into more detailed examples, involve guest speakers from the automotive and other industries, and even host workshops where participants could play with some of Deepgram's recently open-sourced technology.

"A lot of companies and a lot of people see [AI] as scary and complex, and it's really not," Sypniewski says. "It's very intuitive, and it's very simple for a lot of people to get into, and I want people to start to appreciate that and hopefully see more companies, even in this area, start to try it."