Become a Freelance Machine Learning Engineer by Gaining Confidence Through Omdena AI Challenges

Seif Mohamed from Egypt completed several Omdena Challenges ranging from predicting cardiac arrest to optimizing routes. Upon these projects, he became an Omdena Top Talent to work on paid gigs with companies at Egyptian Steel, and later as a senior machine learning engineer at Transition Technologies PSC.

What is your background?

I am originally a mechatronics engineer and I got my BSc. in mechatronics engineering in 2008. I worked in this field until 2017. I shifted to software engineering and machine learning when I started working as an automation engineer in a steel manufacturing plant. During this period, I have worked on various projects in software development and machine learning. I developed web applications, APIs, business intelligence systems, and also process control systems using machine learning algorithms.

My journey with machine learning began about 3 years ago [2019] when I started self-learning machine learning from a beginner level. I cleared a lot of basic courses and then started more advanced topics like deep learning and reinforcement learning. I practiced a lot on different types of projects in Kaggle and used public datasets to learn more every day.

Finally, I also finished the AWS machine learning specialty certificate and that was a big step because having this one, I needed to start working on real-world large-scale projects and use my cloud skills. At this time I joined Omdena.

When and how did you enter Omdena? What was the reason?

I started my first project with Omdena about a year ago, and that was for 2 reasons. First,  I loved the idea of working with a team from over the globe and with different experience levels and backgrounds. Second,  the project idea and impact were really exciting for me, I mean there was a great learning experience ahead that I saw in joining Omdena.

What technical solution did you build recently in a project?

I built a machine learning classifier using ANN and a tree-based algorithm.

Some projects Seif took part in:

• Optimizing Routes to Improve Logistics Using AI Planning

• Predicting Painful Behaviors For Elbow Using Machine Learning
• Predict Cardiac Arrest Using AI
• Building Machine Learning Models to Increase the Accuracy of Body Weight Readings that are Used as an Indicator of Well being of Elderly

What was the biggest obstacle you overcame recently?

I’ve started to learn PyTorch to help me understand a lot of research papers in the machine-learning community.

How did the Omdena experience help you in your career till now?

I worked on different phases of a machine learning project. During the data analysis phase, I learned to live the data first before stepping forward to modeling. Actually, there were a lot of insights that I learned from this phase also worked in a deployment phase where I learned a bit about Mlops technologies and their impact on the whole solution. I believe those skills helped me greatly in structuring machine learning projects in my career.

Any concluding words?

Omdena was a real change in my career as a machine learning engineer. Actually, Omdena took me from just developing machine learning projects in notebooks to production-ready machine learning pipelines and the development of scalable systems. I have met a lot of very skilled machine learning engineers and worked with them as a team and gained a lot of experience from working with them. Moreover, the real-world projects solved real problems and have had a great impact on the community.  This gave me a lot of confidence afterward. I have participated in many projects with Omdena through Omdena challenges and also paid opportunities through Omdena’s Top Talent program. This also helped me later to land my first job as a machine learning freelancer and opened to me other opportunities as a freelancer. Finally, I have been hired as a senior machine learning engineer in a great company that provides Industry 4.0 services and solutions.  

“The journey so far is amazing, and I am enjoying every moment of it. I am looking forward to a bright future where I do what I love and create an impact.”

Ready to test your skills?

If you’re interested in collaborating, apply to join an Omdena project at: https://www.omdena.com/projects