Onboarding [Before Session #1]
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Onboarding [Before Session #1]

Before session #1, the idea is create a solid onboarding for the upcoming folks. The intuition here is that in the first 3 weeks of the group, you’d like a Core group skimmed out & onboarded with project essentials. That way, most group time can be used for creative exploration.
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We’ve figured out a 3 part to help with that.
Please add the following to the landing page of your Working group, below the heading ā€˜Onboarding’.
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Part 1

Creating a ā€˜solution architecture’ for your group. That is a fancy way of saying that you have to break down the intended project to its component parts.
Find below a sample.
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We recommed using draw.io for this. And don’t worry if you’re not comprehensive the first time, you can always re-visit to tweak.
Note: Each box is essentially a ā€˜small task’ in the project. How big or small said ā€˜task’ is ultimately a judgement call. The one rule of thumb is ā€˜keep it small enough that it can be picked up & put in a project with a different dataset’.
The text near the shapes are techniques the group would like to explore.
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Part 2

Create Recipes
A ā€˜Recipe’ is a list of resources that - when followed along - have you ā€˜do something’.
Put another way, you should be able to say for any Recipe.

Minimum Goal

By the end, a reviewer will have, with understanding …
Started from: [Default: Scratch]
  • Scratch
Succeeded at:
  • Building their first Neural network!
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To re-emphasize, not ā€˜teach you to be able to do’ … but ā€˜have you do’.
Samples [Of the 4 common types of Recipes]:
A Recipe on obtaining domain knowledge: Satellite Image Interpretation. (Minimal domain knowledge critical for a good data scientist)
A Recipe on doing a non-coding task: Data Acquisition.
A Recipe on doing a typical coding task: Building landcover classification model.
A Recipe on learning a tool: Google Colab Essentials. (Agg Intellect groups are expected to use Colab for projects to ensure easy sharing unless a strong reason otherwise.)
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For each of the shapes in your solution architecture diagram, take time to create at least 1 onboarding Recipe.
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On how to create a Recipe, refer to the starter video below.
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PS. Write-up assets can be made directly using the Chrome Extension now.
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Part 3

Once you have created a Recipe, the next step is ensuring it in fact does what it says it does.
Essentially, whatever you ā€˜wrote someone can get done’ with the Recipe - we’ll have an independent reviewer do it. If there are gaps, they will coordinate to help fill.
For that reason, assign ā€˜Aggregate Intellect’ as the reviewer in your Recipe [as opposed to ā€˜auto assign reviewer’]. He will double check your work to ensure it runs robustly.
Be sure to send in all your Recipes for review at least 5 days session #1 of your group, and be active on the AISC Slack after. Your assigned reviewer/s will reach out to help fill in gaps with feedback.
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Part 4

If all that seems a bit overwhelming, then don’t worry. To help save time, we’ve creating a growing ā€˜menu of validated recipes’ you can use as a starting point. Think building blocks for onboarding you can mix & match for your use case.
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How to use?
Take this ā€˜Training your first Random Forest’ Recipe from our menu. A reviewer has gone through it in detail to ensure it can be trusted.
In practice, applying Random Forests to your use case might need some additional pre-processing or tweaking. And chance are, you know the additional resources / can put together a small writeup that talk about said ā€˜additional steps’.
Now instead of building a Recipe from scratch, that first teaches the foundations of Random Forests, then the specific kind of random forests you need, you can simply create a Recipe in Recipe.
Sample [Random Forests applied to Landcover data]
Refer to this tutorial on adding ā€˜recipes to recipes’.
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Our Menu of Recipes
Essential Tools
Common Models
Model Optimization related
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Finished Sample


The below should be under the ā€˜Onboarding Heading’ on your landing page.
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Onboarding [Technical + Domain Knowledge]


Our tentative solution architecture
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Recipes
Google Colab Essentials [Recommended virtual Environment for Agg Intellect community projects]
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Part 5


Be sure to fill in a starter dataset on your landing page! [One exception: You have a Recipe that gets folks to the starter dataset themselves]
Eg.
Videos are provided of various amputees walking with prosthetics in various scenarios.
… linked here …
The participants are welcome to independently source additional videos and images of amputees and prosthetics.
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