At the moment our sponsored competitions are only open to the residents of Canada, United States, and Europe. We are working with our lawyers to expand this. 

If you are from other areas, you could still participate in independent capstone build or other paid or free activities.

Not particularly! Obviously, the more you know the better. But, part of our philosophy is "learning by doing" (ehm, I mean "experiential learning" - to be fancier than necessary). So, you will be learning a #$#$h load from your peers as you try to build things together. All we need you to bring is your ambition, curiosity, and well, enough coding skills. You will also have the option to purchase our expert curated video and code packages, as well as access to private office hours with experts when you sign up for monthly subscription (CAD$19.99 per month)

There is no catch. We believe that building impactful products in emerging tech is something that most people should get exposed to sooner or later. Besides we charge companies who post problem statements a premium fee that enables us to keep it free for developers. 

I mean, we can't really stop you if that's what you want! BUT do we encourage it? Not really!!! There is *SO* much learning in doing things together with peers. However, we understand that some folks prefer that. You can select your preference during the sign up

Since this is a service that is provided for free, in order to ensure high quality of the participants, we expect the "project proposal" as proof of work. Therefore our primary metric for accepting proposals is thoroughness. In other words, your submission doesn't need to be advanced as much as it needs to demonstrate your effort in understanding the problem statement well with information available to you and your effort to plan the project as much as possible. 

The Prizes will be awarded by a panel of judges consisting of representatives of the Sponsor (50%) and our community experts (50%) based on the following:

1. Effort put in (problem discovery, data collection, training, etc)
2. Readiness of the solution (can it be used locally or non-locally by many people? how much work is needed for the solution to become minimally viable?)
3. Optimization (how quickly can your solution perform inference? Points may also be awarded for training optimizations, such as transfer learning.)
4. Interpretability (how easy is it to explain why your solution works?)
5. Performance (how well does your solution perform in terms of accuracy - may be a combination of objective and subjective metrics, or other unsupervised performance metrics).
6. Practicality of the application (is what you built solving an interesting practical problem in a way that can be used by intended users?)
7. Technical soundness (are you using the right evaluation metrics? Are you using the right algos? Are you interpreting your results correctly?)
8. Originality & Creativity (were you able to reframe the problem, or perhaps collect / synthesize data, in a creative manner which sidesteps some of the more challenging obstacles? Did you have an original approach to solving the problem or sufficed to overly done approaches?)
9. Clarity of communication (is it easy to follow your story, and technical detail in your deck and video?)
10. Quality of production (is the audio/video quality of your final deliverable acceptable) 
11. Commercial Use (does your solution use copyright or proprietary material, or is it available with an unrestricted license?)
12. Code Quality (is your code easy for other engineers to understand and modify?)

We estimate around 10 hours a week, but it really depends on your base level, and how much effort you want to put in. It also depends on how effectively you "divide and conquer" with your team members.

Join our community slack workspace, just hang out there and use all our free content until you're ready. Post any questions you have in #cohort8-support (or DM Amir Feizpour). Alternatively, check out our Discussion Groups. 

If you are working on a company sponsored project, you would be pre-assigning all intellectual property to them. If your solution is not chosen as a winner, you can still publish your work publicly for your portfolio as long as you respect all confidentiality and data privacy terms you agree to as part of the competition. This concretely means that if you don't win, you can remove all references to the sponsor company (their name & brand, any results obtained from their confidential data, all original data they provided and data you derived from their data, any specific details about their use case, etc) and then publish your work publicly.

A lot of our users join our cohorts to add something to their personal / professional portfolio, or refine their ideas for that awesome venture they've been dreaming about. Since we really like ambitious people like you, aggregate intellect doesn't have any claims over the IP you generate as part of our cohorts. It is all yours! all of it!!!