Today’s university lecture was about machine learning as applied to the field of image recognition. I was there as a tutor assisting the lecturing professor, who went over various details of how machine learning works, different algorithms, and how to measure their various statistical types of performance so you can compare them. In the tutorial part of the session the students got to run various classification algorithms and play with the software tools that we provide.
Several teams also asked me about the end of semester project and reports that they have to do. They’re thinking about what topic they want to investigate and they need to get our approval before beginning, just in case they attempt anything unethical or questionable. (For example, using copyrighted data or taking photos of people without consent.) One group was thinking about using medical scans to detect cancerous tumours, another using automotive camera photos to classify objects on or near roads that cars might need to avoid, another just using a large database of photos of different objects to classify them, and another hoping to read photos of car number plates. These are all kind of standard ideas that many teams often have and are all fine.
Other activities today: Mailing more Magic cards to an eBay buyer. Walking Scully a couple of times. Making spaghetti pesto for dinner.
Oh, and we had some rain while I was coming home from university. It’s the first rain we’ve had since 24 August, 19 days ago, when we just had a trace 0.2 mm. The last time we had serious rain was 17 August. We’ve really been enjoying the lack of rain though, after the last 2.5 years of ridiculous amounts of rainfall.
New content today: