Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items tagged machinelearning in 2018

Filters: Year: 2018 × machinelearning × Sorted by date


Without deep understanding of the basic tools needed to build and train new algorithms, he says, researchers creating AIs resort to hearsay, like medieval alchemists. “People gravitate around cargo-cult practices,” relying on “folklore and magic spells,” adds François Chollet, a computer scientist at Google in Mountain View, California.

Matthew Hutson # 26th December 2018, 4:53 pm

jantic/DeOldify (via) “A Deep Learning based project for colorizing and restoring old images”. Delightful (and well documented) project that uses a Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network to colorize old black and white photos, with extremely impressive results. Built on an older version of the fastai library, and trained by running for several days on a 1080TI graphics card. # 2nd November 2018, 11:13 am

Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards (via) Fascinating result: by teaching a reinforcement learning agent that plays video games to optimize for “unfamiliar states”—states where it cannot predict what will happen next—the agent does a much better job of playing some games. “... for the first time exceeds average human performance on Montezuma’s Revenge. RND achieves state-of-the-art performance, periodically finds all 24 rooms and solves the first level without using demonstrations or having access to the underlying state of the game.” # 31st October 2018, 11:51 pm

Automatically playing science communication games with transfer learning and fastai

This weekend was the 9th annual Science Hack Day San Francisco, which was also the 100th Science Hack Day held worldwide.

[... 1174 words]

Notebook: How to build a Teachable Machine with TensorFlow.js (via) This is a really cool Observable notebook. It explains how to build image classification that runs in the browser on top of Tensorflow.js, and includes interactive demos that hook into your webcam and let you hold up items and use them to train a classifier. Since it’s built on Observable every single underlying line of source code is available to browse as part of the essay. # 20th June 2018, 9:10 pm

Text Embedding Models Contain Bias. Here’s Why That Matters (via) Excellent discussion from the Google AI team of the enormous challenge of building machine learning models without accidentally encoding harmful bias in a way that cannot be easily detected. # 17th April 2018, 8:54 pm

Suppose a runaway success novel/tv/film franchise has “Bob” as the evil bad guy. Reams of fanfictions are written with “Bob” doing horrible things. People endlessly talk about how bad “Bob” is on twitter. Even the New York times writes about Bob latest depredations, when he plays off current events.

Your name is Bob. Suddenly all the AIs in the world associate your name with evil, death, killing, lying, stealing, fraud, and incest. AIs silently, slightly ding your essays, loan applications, uber driver applications, and everything you write online. And no one believes it’s really happening. Or the powers that be think it’s just a little accidental damage because the AI overall is still, overall doing a great job of sentiment analysis and fraud detection.

Daniel Von Fange # 17th April 2018, 8:51 pm

BearID: Bear Face Detector. Comprehensive tutorial on building a computer vision system to identify faces of bears, using dlib and the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) technique. Bears! # 1st March 2018, 5:31 pm

A Promenade of PyTorch. Useful overview of the PyTorch machine learning library from Facebook AI Research described as “a Python library enabling GPU-accelerated tensor computation”. Similar to TensorFlow, but where TensorFlow requires you to explicitly construct an execution graph PyTorch instead lets you write regular Python code (if statements, for loops etc) which PyTorch then uses to construct the execution graph for you. # 21st February 2018, 5:31 am

6M observations total! Where has iNaturalist grown in 80 days with 1 million new observations? Citizen science app iNaturalist is seeing explosive growth at the moment—they’ve been around for nearly a decade but 1/6 of the observations posted to the site were added in just the past few months. Having tried the latest version of their iPhone app it’s easy to see why: snap a photo of some nature and upload it to the app and it will use surprisingly effective machine learning to suggest the genus or even the individual species. Submit the observation and within a few minutes other iNaturalist community members will confirm the identification or suggest a correction. It’s brilliantly well executed and an utter delight to use. # 28th January 2018, 8:18 pm

Statistical NLP on OpenStreetMap. libpostal is ferociously clever: it’s a library for parsing and understanding worldwide addresses, built on top of a machine learning model trained on millions of addresses from OpenStreetMap. Al Barrentine describes how it works in this fascinating and detailed essay. # 8th January 2018, 7:33 pm