Getting an AI Accelerator - Seoul Tech Society

Seoul Tech Society, a meetup group held their first meetup under the title 'AI Asia: Our Experience Getting an AI Accelerator off the Ground'. The keynote speaker, Mr. Tak Lo, a Hong Kong-based Accelerator, with wide experience ranging from venture capitalist, startup CEO, Director Techstars London, and now a founding partner of Zeroth.ai, gave a casual yet inspiring talk on AI/ Machine Learning and startups in general.

The Challenges of startups are many from proper outsourcing in academic institutions, market ready graduates on job-hunting mission, to scouting from the ever elusive experts in the industry. Tak says networking and referrals are good means of getting a good catch. Referrals from venture capitalists, online/offline communities, and other company founders top the list of most hiring. CEOs look for people who have special features and value to add to the company or product at hand. This makes this process crucial for a hiring startup or an existing company. Some people end up trading for big intellectuals with big names, or just decide to prioritize optimization of the company's produce and opt for low cost productive talents.

Being an AI/ ML meetup, Tak insists there is need of big data in training the algorithms to be robust with minimal errors.

Each region/ country have their own startup challenges including government investor regulations, culture, with example of service oriented vs technological innovations. Accelerators are looking to add value to the innovative talents with cutting-edge technologies that will effect many lives. Support areas include a hard-cash jump-start capital (US $ 20,000), and depending on the availability of the startup company, product development, business strategy, technical and customer support.

Just like the main stream of AI field, Tak Lo is looking to partner and support startups in the areas of; -> Natural Language Processing - especially in other languages apart from English. -> Sensory perception - detection of such signals as sound in non-obvious ways -> Autonomous Navigation - unstructured environment data collection, training and control (Example application ~ Autonomous Driving -> Meta layers information processing - multi-data analysis as in simulation and predictability.

All in all, it was a good experience and tech lovers in and around Seoul should try and attend such forums whenever presented with such opportunity. The only requirement is English as a language of communication and your valuable time which is never a waste. And good news, it is FREE. Surely^^.

See you in the next one.