Hugging Face has announced a new Fellowship Program aimed at supporting exceptional contributors to the open-source machine learning ecosystem. The program seeks to empower key individuals to scale their impact and inspire further contributions.
How the Fellowship Works
The Fellowship is designed to support contributors in ways that best fit their needs. Fellows are nominated by the Hugging Face team or existing Fellows, with the primary criterion being significant contributions to democratizing open-source ML.
Benefits
Benefits vary per Fellow but may include:
- Computing resources
- Merchandise and assets
- Official recognition from Hugging Face
How to Become a Fellow
Fellows are currently nominated. To get noticed, prospects should contribute to open-source ML in areas like:
- Sharing models on the Hub
- Creating tutorials and projects
- Organizing local sprints
- Translating documentation
Hugging Face emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion, welcoming all backgrounds.
Examples of Inaugural Fellows
- María Grandury: Founded the largest Spanish NLP community and organized a hackathon producing 23 Spaces, 23 datasets, and 33 models.
- Manuel Romero: Contributed over 300 models to the Hub and trained multiple SOTA Spanish models.
- Aritra Roy Gosthipathy: Added TensorFlow architectures to Transformers and improved Keras tooling.
- Vaibhav Srivastav: Led the ML4Audio working group and paper discussions.
- Bram Vanroy: Helped contributors and the Hugging Face team with issues and pull requests since 2019.
- Christopher Akiki: Contributed to sprints, workshops, Big Science, and demos.
- Ceyda Çınarel: Created successful Spaces models, including ButterflyGAN.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Can beginners apply? Fellows are nominated based on contributions; beginners should start contributing first. Students may consider the Student Ambassador Program (deadline June 13, 2022).
- Where to contribute? Ideas include sharing models, creating tutorials, organizing sprints, translating courses, or working on specific projects listed in the Fellowship Doc.
- Will I be an employee? No, the Fellowship does not constitute employment.