How to Run Large-Scale Educational Workshops in Deep Learning & Data Science

Pulling together deep learning workshops for a large number of students, however, can be a time consuming, error prone, and costly exercise. Furthermore, technical issues with the environment setup and compatibility problems during the workshops impede learning and cause student dissatisfaction. These workshops typically have participants bring their laptops and have them download and install new software. However, with the wide range of laptop platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), numerous configurations, and version conflicts with existing software, workshops can become frustrating both for presenters and attendees. The RAM and disk space available on laptops and their lack of GPUs affect the types of hands-on labs that can be offered, as deep learning workshops benefit heavily from specialized hardware such as GPUs. An alternative is to build new cloud based custom VMs specifically for the training – this avoids compatibility issues but is quite time consuming and often not reusable based on our experience.