Google is pumping tensorflow

Some misc news regarding deep learning. Got them from my colleagues Guy Rapoport Charlie Maalouf.

1) Google released an interesting new course about TensorFlow. I viewed the first lecture, looks like a lot of effort is invested. Interestingly, you need to install sklearn for performing the first exercise, which actually means that TensorFlow does not solve everything as some people think.

2) DataBricks claims to support TensorFlow: although when reading the content it is not clear where Spark is used. Seems likes an opportunity to hop on something cool. It seems they propose to run many different experiments in parallel (what we call embarrassingly parallel) but for that you can write a bash script so not clear why Spark is needed or required here.

3) Microsoft woke up and released their own deep learning toolkit. Not clear what is new there (in terms of functionality). But they claim much superior performance to TensorFlow:

Data Science Summit - registration is open

Join us July 12-13, 2016 in SF for the 5th annual Data Science Summit. The Summit brings together 1400 developers and data scientists for talks and tutorials by the top minds in industry and research. Learn to leverage the best new advances in data science and applied machine learning, and discover how industry greats are building the next generation of data products and intelligent applications.

This non-profit event is organized jointly by Intel, Dato and O’Reilly. The conference agenda has been co-created with Dr. Ben Lorica, Chief Scientist of O’Reilly Media who serves as the content manager of the O’Reilly Strata Conferences.

Preliminary speakers, more coming soon…

• Prof. Alex Smola - Carnegie Mellon University & Marianas Labs
• Xavier Amatriain - Quora
• Prof. Carlos Guestrin - Dato & University of Washington
• Wes McKinney - Cloudera
• Prof. Magdalena Balazinska - University of Washington
• Anthony Goldbloom - CEO Kaggle
• Prof. Mike Jordan - UC Berkeley
• Kevin Novak - Uber
• Prof. Chris Re - Stanford University

We invite all related companies and research labs to submit talks about novel case studies, algorithms and applications.

There are flexible sponsorship options for companies who want to get involved.

Expected audience: 1400 data scientists, developers, researchers, CTOs, VPs of Engineering and Product, VPs of data analytics, professors and students.

Date & Location: July 12-13, 2016 at the Fairmont San Francisco Hotel

Registration is open - please use this 20% off discount code when registering:

bixon.

3D modeling with GraphLab Create

About a year ago I gave a demo of GraphLab Create to Prof. Amit Wolf from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). I was pleasantly surprised to learn  this week that Amit started to use GraphLab Create for 3D modeling. Together with his assistant Jordan Squires they created a workshop for training architecture students. The task is to bridge the gap between 3D scans of 3D printed objects and their 3D plan mesh. I got some amazing photos which present this work:

Anyone who wants to learn more about this work is welcome to attend our Data Science Summit US where Amit will give a talk about this work.

Deep learning

A nice treatment to the buzz round deep learning (got this from Yishay Carmiel @ Spoken)

1-page acquires Marianas Labs

Just found today that Alex Smola's startup was purchased 12 days ago: http://au.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/brief-1-page-acquires-innovative-data-science-company-18239

Here is a talk by Alex about his startup in our annual data science summit.