Games as a gateway to mastering machine learning

Artificial intelligence is transforming industries at lightning speed and redefining the future of work as we know it.

However, as I have witnessed firsthand throughout my journey, access to opportunity in this explosively growing field is far from equal. I've seen bright minds and self-taught geniuses get rejected simply because they don't have the “right” qualifications or don't follow a traditional path. I strongly believe that AI has the potential to greatly benefit humanity, from advancing medical research to solving complex global challenges. AI is essential to our future.

So the problem is clear. Even if you don't have a Ph.D., you can graduate from a prestigious university, or for that matter, get any degree.

That's why I'm passionate about creating opportunities for people to develop their skills in the field of AI. Credentials are certainly impressive and are a great way to easily identify if you're doing the prerequisite work to become a machine learning expert, or an expert in any field, but you can't qualify without one. , there are many skilled and talented individuals out there. How to access them. So if you want to discover and showcase this “non-traditional” talent, you need a platform where anyone can compete with qualified talent and prove they have the right skills. That's why I founded his ArenaX Labs.

I've always loved mathematics. As a child, I was drawn to the certain comfort of numbers and became fascinated by their use in probability-based games like poker and blackjack. Mathematics had an almost poetic beauty to me. There was no room for ambiguity or shades of gray in the realm of mathematics. Without hiding behind subjective rhetoric, it was either definitely right or definitely wrong.

As a teenager, I loved the stock market and became deeply fascinated by its intricacies. At the time, I didn't know the term, but I wondered if I could create a “function approximator” for various stocks, something that could predict future asset prices based on historical data and other relevant information. The answer, as I gradually discovered, lay in the field of machine learning.

Thus, my journey into the world of machine learning began with an important special lecture I took during my senior year of college. Impressed by the speaker's cutting-edge research in algorithmic trading, I immediately went on stage and convinced him to accept me as his student. I wanted to learn anything the speakers could teach me.

After that, it was a grueling 18-hour day mastering the R programming language (anyone who has used R knows how painful it is) while doing a full course load. A few months went on. It took a few months after graduation, but I was thrilled to finally get a job as a “quant,'' or quantitative analyst, at a pension fund. The person who gave me the job was Wei Xie, another important mentor who gave me the opportunity. He later becomes the co-founder of ArenaX Labs.

But as I progressed in my career, I began to see a troubling pattern again and again. Even though talented people have painstakingly taught themselves all the necessary skills through sheer discipline and self-directed learning, they are excluded from key positions because they don't have the “right” qualifications or pedigree. I've seen it done many times. I reflected on my own non-traditional path and realized how easily I could have gotten stuck early on without the intervention of a key mentor who gave me a real chance to prove my worth. I looked back at how warm it was.

A vision began to take shape in my mind. It is a platform that connects overlooked machine learning practitioners with opportunities worthy of their talents on a global scale. I envisioned a global hub where everyone, regardless of their background, could gain practical experience, showcase their skills, and be recognized for their accomplishments based solely on merit.

This is why I took the plunge in 2021 to launch ArenaX Labs and quickly launched our flagship product, AI Arena. AI Arena is a no-code game that makes the abstract concepts of machine learning more accessible and interesting to a wider audience. This game serves as a bridge to SAI. SAI is a gamified research platform that hosts machine learning competitions and ultimately hopes to reward people for developing high-performance machine learning models.

Our mission with these products was to make machine learning more accessible and fun for aspiring developers around the world. By gamifying the process of learning and applying machine learning techniques, we aimed to encourage more people to explore this important skill set in a fun and engaging way. The ultimate goal is to increase machine learning literacy and proficiency globally. Machine learning is expected to be one of the most important capabilities in the coming years. We want to inspire a new generation of machine learning professionals through the power of play.

Brandon Da Silva is the founder and CEO of ArenaX Labs, a Toronto-based technology company dedicated to teaching the world about AI through the power of play.