The xRC Simulator or Autodesk's Synthesis allow First Robotic Competition teams to drive simulated robots around the season's field, allowing early practice with driving, viewlines, and team strategy.

While Synthesis seems to provide higher fidelity, xRC seems a little more user-friendly to me.

Installing on Windows is straightforward, but if …

Felt potentially communicative, might delete later.

Focus on data transformation and scenarios, not math, if you want to get into real-world Machine Learning. Yes, you’ll eventually have to learn some math, but the abstraction level within ML engineering has already moved on.

Learning the theory and math at the foundations of Machine Learning is like …

Jessica Knoll’s “Bright Young Women”

Jessica Knoll's "Bright Young Women" has such strong beginning and ending chapters, with stakes that are truly life-and-death, that the middle chapters are a bit of a let-down. The central thematic premise of the book is that, for perverse reasons, serial killers become celebrities …

Mantas Deployed, Time for Whales

Since last Fall, I’ve been working on reidentifying reef manta rays with “low k-shot” (few labeled examples). That project is now deployed to the scientists and, until they start giving me feedback (and hopefully, more labeled data) pretty much at the finish line.

My …

Reading Susan Orleans' On Animals I'm struck by how essentially different from LLM-generated text her essays are. Now, of course, Orleans is at the highest tier of talent so it may not be saying much that "Well, that kind of writing isn't going to be usurped by LLMs soon." But …

Reading Recommendations: Machine Learning for Non-Coders

The best orientation to machine learning (ML) I could find is Machine Learning Explained from MIT Sloan. That gives a good overall orientation, even if it, like all texts, suffers from underestimating the speed at which ML capabilities are evolving. I don’t think …

ResNet-style CNNs To Predict Freshwater Algae Blooms in Satellite Imagery: Mediocre Results

Although I have no domain experience with satellite imagery, I've used convolutional neural nets with aerial photography to recognize marine debris. So when I saw the DataDriven challenge 'Tick Tick Bloom' I took a glance at the dataset …

The Mastodon API is very straightforward, as is the OpenAI API for its NLP models. I wrote a quick proof-of-concept program to do sentiment analysis of "toots.".

My current project is re-identifying individual manta rays (Mobula alfredi and Mobula birostris) by their distinct belly patterns … er… ventral markings.

Every night at two spots on the Big Island of Hawai’i where I live, dive boats shine bright lights that attract plankton. Most nights, the plankton in turn …