Although relatively simple, Naïve Bayes (NB) is one of the powerful machine learning techniques. It’s not only simple but fast and accurate and has been used in various applications and domains. So, it’s a reliable friend that you can trust on rainy days! In this post, we will see how it works. Who is NB’s […]
I recently had a problem where part of the solution was to do a series of pointer accesses that would walk around a chunk of memory in pseudo-random order. Sattolo's algorithm provides a solution to this because it produces a permutation of a list with exactly one cycle, which guarantees that we will reach every element of the list even though we're traversing it in random order. However, the explanations of why the algorithm worked that I could find online either used some kind of mat
In our previous post on machine learning, we explained that there are supervised and unsupervised beasts lurking in machine learning land! One of the simplest machine learning techniques is the K-nearest neighbors (KNN). In this post, we will briefly review the way KNN works. We’ve all heard of lazy guys! With technology being more accessible […]
As more data becomes available, it gets harder to find and discover what to look for! As we discussed in our previous post topic modeling is a powerful unsupervised machine learning technique to discover hidden themes in a collection of documents. Topic modeling has achieved popularity in different disciplines because it offers several meaningful […]
There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of consumer tablets, the experience is terrible. At 10ms (1/100th of a second), the latency is noticeable, but the experience
John Ford is a public sector Research Psychologist who has authored numerous reports and articles about assessment, training, and other personnel management issues. He wrote this guest blog about a recent challenge of how to deal more efficiently with out of office messages with respect to tabulating the survey response rate. In this blog he […]
Throughout history, we have been interested in seeing the future, either in the form of checking the arrival time of the prince on a white horse or predicting stock prices to get rich! What caused this curse?! It’s probably part of human nature but we can also trace fortune-telling back to the advent of astrology, […]
6 minute read Shopify Capital provides funding to help merchants on Shopify grow their businesses. But how does Shopify Capital award these merchant cash advances? In this post, I'll dive deep into the machine-learning technique our Risk-Algorithms team uses to decide eligibility for cash advances. The exact features that go into the predictive model that powers Shopify Capital are secret, but I can share the key technique we use: quantile regression.
Many believe robotics is on the cusp of becoming the next technological revolution and that we should expect a significant impact from “intelligent” robots in the near future. Even today, we can see robots and intelligent systems working here and there in different domains. But, robotics is only one application of machine learning and artificial […]
We saw earlier that although machines are stone-hearted, they can learn! As a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning algorithms enable computers to learn from data, and even improve themselves, without being explicitly programmed. That’s how your Siri communicates with you, or how your super car parks itself, or, partially, how your bank approves […]
Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people who think that using the keyboard is faster are just deluding themselves. This might sound extreme, but, just for example, one page says that the author has “never seen [the keybo
I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t understand about this claim is, if the claim is true, why shouldn’t the startup go to an investor, sell their options for what they claim their options to be worth, and then pay me in cash? The non-obvious value of options combined with their volatility is a barrier for recruiting. Additiona
Provalis Research is holding a three-day training workshop for QDA Miner 5 and WordStat 7 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The training will be held from August 16th to August 18, 2017 at the Provalis Research head office. It is also possible to register for a 2 day QDA Miner workshop only. However, when the number of participants […]
The ALS algorithm introduced by Hu et al., is a very popular technique used in Recommender System problems, especially when we have implicit datasets (for example clicks, likes etc). It can handle large volumes of data reasonably well and we can find many good implementations in various Machine Learning frameworks. Spark includes the algorithm in […]
The dstat is an awesome little tool which allows you to get resource statistics for your Linux box. It has a modular architecture which allows you to develop additional plugins and it’s easy to use. Recently I was profiling a Deep Learning pipeline developed with Keras and Tensorflow and I needed detailed statistics about the […]
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were readable, as were pages by academics who hadn’t updated the styling on their website since 1995. But very few commercial websites were usable (other than Google). When I measured m
Datumbox Framework v0.8.0 is out and packs several powerful features! This version brings new Preprocessing, Feature Selection and Model Selection algorithms, new powerful Storage Engines that give better control on how the Models and the Dataframes are saved/loaded, several pre-trained Machine Learning models and lots of memory & speed improvements. Download it now from Github […]
Several interactive visualizations of a generative model of handwriting. Some are fun, some are serious.
At our last informal event at the old bar we had a look at these papers, what are your thoughts on them? A brain controlled drone race! Link Play a game of “20 Questions” using only brainwaves Link Will scientists soon be able to read minds? Neuroscientists are starting to decipher what a person is seeing, remembering and dreaming just by looking at their brain …
HN comments are terrible . On any <a href="https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1280651255275
Us neuroscientists have decided to take a trip to london to attend the BNA Christmas Symposium, with this years topic being Mental Health! It’s on Monday 12th, but we went all out and decided we want a full weekend in london. The plan is to get the megabus down on Saturday, the day after lectures finish for the term. We’ll stay in a hostel for 2 …
Our upcoming event on 25th October at the Old Bar, 5-6pm will concern the topic of consciousness. Come along to discuss! ‘Definition: the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings’. What is consciousness to you? How would you define it? We’ll be looking at scientific papers, less scientific and easy to understand articles as well as discussing recent research into consciousness going …
When we look very closely at images generated by neural networks, we often see a strange checkerboard pattern of artifacts.
There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, and even if a topic is that important, people's learning preferences differ too much for any book on that topic to be the best book on the topic for all people. This is a list of topics and books where I've read the book , am
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes, The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market. The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career. ... If you're luc
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack O
Following a huge turnout at our intro event, we invite you to join us for our first formal event! Where? Baines Wing 2.16 When? 11th October 5-6pm We have two level 3 Neuroscience students: Molly Campbell from the All That is Neuro blog presenting her article on Musicogenic Epilepsy.. can Sean Paul really cause a seizure? Alice van der Schoot talking about a hydrocephalus project she …
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is $350k/yr, where "senior" can mean "someone three years of out school" and it's not uncommon for someone who's considered a hig
TUESDAY 26 September 5-6pm Location: Baines Wing 2.16, University of Leeds https://www.facebook.com/events/1220078328065408/ During Fresher’s week we had people signing up from different fields, such as medicine, psychology, philosophy and yoga. We will explain which kind of activities we will be doing this year: 1) giving students the opportunity to practise presentations of neuroscience-related topics (no marking, no lecturers, no pressure!) 2) informal chats at the …
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has . I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there are many possible paths into programming. Personally, I spent a decade working as an electrical engineer before taking
A visual overview of neural attention, and the powerful extensions of neural networks being built on top of it.
Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature echos this result -- a simple checker that looks for totally unimplemented error handling can find hu
This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of writing people find helpful for them are too different for any such list to contain a non-zero number of items (if you want the entire list to be helpful to everyone). So here's a list of some things you might want to read, and why you might (or might not) want to read them. <a href="https://shipilev.net
The book starts with a story about a time Margaret Hamilton brought her young daughter with her to NASA, back in the days of the Apollo program. During a simulation mission, her daughter caused the mission to crash by pressing some keys that caused a prelaunch program to run during th
An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some engineers I know at companies that are desperately hiring. My engineering friends thought Mike's resume was fine, but most recruiters rejected him in the resume screening phase. W
These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr . Since there was some controversy over su3su2u1's identity, I'll note that I am not su3su2u1 and that hosting this material is neither an endorsement nor a sign of agreement. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality full review I opened up a bottle of delicious older-than-me scotch when Terry Pratchett died,
These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr . A Roundabout Approach to Quantum Mechanics This will be the first post in what I hope will be a series that outlines some ideas from quantum mechanics. I will try to keep it light, and not overly math filled- which means I’m not really teaching you physics. I’m teaching you some flavor of the physics. I originally wrote here “you ca
