Why Southeast Asia?
At 640 million people, Southeast Asians constitute nearly 10% of the world’s population. Nevertheless, Southeast Asians remain extremely underrepresented in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Data from the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2018), one of the two biggest conferences in machine learning with more than 5,000 attendees, suggest that fewer than 0.5% of ICML attendees are from Southeast Asian institutions.
To this end, the SeaMLS aims to kickstart an effort to inspire, encourage, and educate more machine learning engineers, researchers, and data scientists within the Southeast Asian region in the coming years. As artificial intelligence and automation are predicted to transform the labor market in the near future, we work toward a critical vision of more Southeast Asians as pioneers, contributors, and shapers within the artificial intelligence community.