Why I Started The Queen Mary Machine Learning Society

This post is an ode to my time as the President of the Queen Mary Machine Learning Society (QMML), which I founded during my time at Queen Mary University of London. I started this society for two reasons, one to create a community of learning and two because the previous ML related society to which I signed up to hosted a grand total of zero events despite many promises to the contrary.

On the first point, I often find that London and the U.K. as a whole lacks the innovative culture you find in the US. There are not many reading groups, the meetups few and far between and the startup scene is nowhere near as prevalent as in the US. There may be much bigger factors at play, but I believe the culture of UK universities has a big part in this sentiment. I say that to say I started QMML to cultivate a community of learning and innovation around ML in London. I strongly believe in the powers of communities of learning and in this post I will review how successful I have been in this mission.

The society started in January 2023, I was president for 3 semesters and across these we have grown to 88 members. I must admit in my first semester leading the society (January 2023 - June 2023) I made many mistakes in the delivery of QMML. I had always envisioned the main method of learning to be a collaborative session hosted by myself and others (I hosted every session this year but I hope the next president of QMML can change this) where people can come to work together and learn something they might not have alone. I believe to understand things you should start from the foundations, and that code is truth! This guided how I structured the weekly sessions, you can find the notebooks I created.

Going back to my mistakes, the sessions were not always in this format, in the first semester I did not spend much time creating the sessions, instead relying on Karpathy’s great NN Zero to Hero youtube videos to be our main offering, this was as you can imagine a huge failure. My reasoning was that we could watch and learn from the videos together, however I failed to recognise I was offering nothing new and no reason for students to attend my sessions. The low turnout motivated me to create the notebooks you see and these had a much better response from those who attended our sessions.

Further on the road of fundamentals, QMML hosted a hackathon which I devised. The challenge was to implement a ResNet from scratch with limited resources for aid (no ChatGPT), this event was excellent you can view the winning solution, we worked with the ImageWoof dataset created by Jeremy Howard. I think such events push attendees beyond their own limits and it was amazing to facilitate this, I am excited to see what similar events QMML host going forward. Overall this was a resounding success, I must give thanks to Dr Dimitris Kalogiros here. Dimitris has been a stalwart supporter of QMML from the get go, we would often meet to discuss and flesh out my ideas. Dimitris you have my thanks and I appreciate the support you provided throughout this process, QMML would not be where it is without your support.

To finish off on our journey I’d like to talk about feedback. I found our feedback to be quite fickle, I’d ask attendees of our events for feedback implement the feedback and find that it didn’t pan out as they expected or something new arose. To this end, I found that being selective with the changes I implemented helped as well as staying true to what I believe in through this approach you ensure the people who matter most are listened to without straying from the original goal. For example, when I first started making my own weekly sessions they were in a lecture style which wasn’t nearly interactive enough so I switched to small amounts of exposition and more programming in the session which was a huge success1.

I believe QMML achieved it’s founding mission, albeit on a small scale, and will expand on the groundworks laid down by all involved with the running of the society in its first 18 months. Having handed over the presidency, I am excited to see where the society goes and what lays in store for QMML!

1 Here’s some feedback from attendees: