It was with great pleasure that AI Singapore invited Aurélien Géron and Jared Lander as guest speakers to grace the graduation ceremony of the second batch of apprentices from the AI Apprenticeship Programme (AIAP)™.

Aurélien is the author of Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow, while Jared is the author of R for Everyone. An interesting occasion indeed to have writers of the two dominant programming languages in data science in the house at the same time!

What was even more interesting, of course, were the nuggets of wisdom shared by these two gentlemen from the paths they have walked. There were two points which stood out and, perhaps unsurprisingly, shared by both the great minds – learn and contribute.

Aurélien spoke about the importance of making strong connections during the apprenticeship as well as reaching out to people one does not know. Constantly ask yourself if you are learning and contributing.

Jared praised the data science community in Singapore and shared how some of his best friends are from the data science community in New York. Join a community, listen, learn, speak and share! A believer in open source software, upon which his whole career is built, he exhorted the audience to contribute to it.

It was indeed a privilege to have had Aurélien and Jared at the graduation ceremony. I am sure all the graduates and other members of the audience were greatly inspired!