Hi everyone,
I started Machine Learning Bangladesh in September 2023. It was initially a chapter for TensorFlow, but now a community for AI/ML enthusiasts. I've grown it from 0 to 5,000+ people across the country in 3 years and also made a small team of 5 people.
On 26 July, we're hosting Build with Gemma @Bangladesh (Link not made public yet but originally hosted on Kaggle); hackathons like this are still not so common here, so this is a first time for a lot of students. The Gemma team has approved $2,000 in prize money, which they will directly grant to winners after the event. This is a hybrid event; in-person at my university in Dhaka, plus remote participation across Bangladesh, and free for all university students. We're expecting around 200 participants in person, plus volunteers and judges.
The venue was only available on the 26th, so the timeline is tight, and I wasn't able to shift the date because the funds Gemma has can only be used for in person hackathon and within July.
My university covered $150 toward logistics. I'm still short about $780 for:
If anyone's able to help us bridge this gap, or knows someone who might be able to help us, I'd be really grateful, happy to answer anything in the comments. Not sure if I should have posted here at all. But I've been calling different companies and people for the last 3 days and now just can't do anything, so I decided to post here in case anyone feels like they want to help. Happy to even jump in a call to explain.
Also, I' know people know their stuff here. So I would love suggestions for the problem that I'd give to the participants: participants will be building with Gemma 4 on real problems specific to Bangladesh. If anyone here has thoughts on a good, specific SDG-aligned problem statement, something concrete enough to build in a day, using an open, fine-tunable model, I'd genuinely welcome ideas in the comments.
Thank you for reading this far. 🙏
