Thoughts on Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains”

Jeffrey Hawkins is the CEO of Numenta, a company that has been pursuing machine intelligence since the early 2000s. Prior to that he was the founder of Palm Pilot, the most successful Personal Digital Assistant, the sale of which presumably has funded Numenta this part quarter-century.

Hawkins’ approach is iconoclastic …

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Noodling about with a Neural Network Markup Language

Felt potentially communicative, might delete later.

Some sketches of neural net layer annotations

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Interested in ML?: The math can wait

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 …

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My next project is melonheaded whales

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 …

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Machine Learning for Non-Coders: A Half-Day of Reading

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 …

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

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 …

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Sentiment Analysis of Mastodon Toots is Very Easy

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.".

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Re-Identifying Manta Rays

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

Photo of manta ray 'Queenie' showing distinctive 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 …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Attention

The "attention" in ML is "what you should attend to," not "alertness." In the sentence "They crossed the <???> to get to the other bank." you need to "attend to" the <???> word to disambiguate "bank". If <???> is "street" then it's "bank" as in "financial institution" (most likely). If <???> is "river" then …

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How to train/test on a subset of your FastAI data

If you have a large FastAI (v2) DataLoaders and you're trying to debug something at epoch-scale (such as a custom metric), an easy way to train on a small subset of your data is:

subset_size = 100 # Or whatever
selected_items = np.random.choice(dls.train_ds.items, subset_size …
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