incredibly, Mikel's programming skills in machine learning and AI are almost completely self-taught — there are no courses on building AI-powered systems at his high school in Guildford, just outside of London. He spent big chunks of the last couple of years researching AI and machine learning on the internet, reading articles and watching videos.
"There are lots of free courses online, but I actually didn't take courses. When I had a big problem I wanted to solve, I would just Google around and try to find out about it, so I didn't follow any predefined track. I read about Kaggle online, and I thought, 'Why not try it?'"
After entering various competitions over several months and slowly placing higher and higher, Mikel helped create an algorithm for using computer vision to analyze 8 million YouTube videos to create accurate tags. His team ended up 7th out of 650 teams.