Saturday, July 20, 2019

Uberconf 3

On Day 3 I went to Brian Sletten's Machine Learning sessions:

Machine Learning: Overview

"The term machine learning refers to the automated detection of
meaningful patterns in data."

Machine Learning: Natural Language Processing

Machine Learning: Deep Learning

Research into neural networks began in the 50s with the concept of emulating a neuron by summing a set of weighted inputs, with a response being triggered if the combined values exceeded a threshold.  This was known as a Perceptron.  A perceptron is a single-layer neural network.

Deep Learning refers to the use of neural networks that are more than one layer deep.

Machine Learning: TensorFlow

This brought things a bit more down to earth with the focus on a particular software implementation of machine learning algorithms.

This topic probably comes closest to something I'd be able to apply at work.  As I mentioned earlier, there was not a very strong lineup of Big Data topics.

TensorFlow uses GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units) to accelerate processing.  I was aware that bitcoin mining software did this but this was the first time I saw this acronym or really became aware that GPGPU was being used for a lot of other things.  This is your excuse for getting a really expensive, top-of-the-line graphics card.  If we start applying machine learning algorithms at work, my guess is we will build on top of Spark MLib since we already have such a big investment in the Hadoop, Scala, Spark stack.  It's weird that Brian didn't mention this at all.

There's a JavaScript API called TensorFlowJS that allows you to run ML in your browser!  Your phone!  IOT devices!  And here's another thing you can debug in Chrome DevTools.

Links
Books
A few miscellaneous comments about the show in general...

Women are definitely better represented than in the bad old days.  I would say the percentage of women has increased from around 5% to 20 or 25%.

The Mac is still a popular choice and I didn't notice anyone else running Linux.

Ditch Gradle, maybe reconsider the whole corporate sponsorship thing.

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