Everything

A feed of all the things :)

Photographing Crystals with a Modified Microscope

mini-hw-projects
I recently bought a cheap microscope (this one for $87 but there are lots of variants in this category) and after some fun micro-organism hunting I started seeing what mods…
Jan 11, 2025

Paper walkthrough: rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking

Video
Looking at a recent paper getting impressive MATH performance using test-time compute. I especially like the use of paired ‘preference’ data for training their equivalent of…
Jan 10, 2025

Fine-Tuning on Distances To Paris: Practical LLM Psychology, or ‘Documenting a Quick Test of a Research Hypothesis’

mini-projects
I was reading the paper ‘Connecting the Dots: LLMs can Infer and Verbalize Latent Structure from Disparate Training Data’ the other day and had a hypothesis about how one of…
Jan 9, 2025

Trying Devin

misc

trying a trendy agent product to much disappointment

Jan 8, 2025

Talking to the Duet, and USB in WSL

TILs
I wanted to talk over serial to this duet 3D printer control board, but initially had issues since it didn’t show up in the device list in WSL. TIL: you can share devices…
Jan 4, 2025

2024 Overflow: UV Flourescence, ESPing + ESP32CAM, modernBERT musings, Autobackup & NBDev, LLM Psychology, and Reflections on the year

Blog
It’s Jan 1, 2025. And thanks to family Christmas chaos I’m a little behind writing things up, so this post is a 7ish-in-one round-up so that I can start the year with a…
Jan 1, 2025

Tab Clearning (December 4 2024)

misc

Clearing out my open tabs

Dec 4, 2024

AI Outputs as Junk Food

essays
My first taste of American food was a bacon-and-egg roll in the airport. Immediate impression: “woah this is sweet?!?”. The bread was sweet, the bacon maple-coated… Tasty…
Dec 2, 2024

Making Giant Bubbles

mini-hw-projects
It turns out it’s pretty easy to make GIANT bubbles! This feels like the kind of knowledge that should be more widespread.
Nov 16, 2024

Nerdsnipe: Map Folding

mini-projects
Nerd-sniped by a video from the channel ‘Physics for the Birds’, I looked into what it would take to add an extra item to this sequence of integers: https://oeis.org/A001418 …
Nov 14, 2024

3 Modes of Making with AI

wip
essays
In this post I’ll share a mental model that I’ve found useful recently in thinking through a number of topics related to AI and creativity. I call it the “3 Modes of Making…
Nov 8, 2024

Deploy Your Artifacts!

I’m a big fan of the idea of Sharing Scrappy Fiddles.
Nov 7, 2024

Facewave: Controlling Midi Expression with your webcam

mini-projects
One gripe I’ve had with digital instruments is a lack of expression. Coming from a wind instrument background, I don’t like having no control over a note once it starts. So…
Nov 1, 2024

Mini Synth and Audio Visualization

mini-projects
I’ve been enjoying creating lots of little projects with Claude artifacts and other tools (post on that soon). Two especially fun ones were both audio related: a mini synth…
Oct 30, 2024

Tab Clearning (October 7 2024)

misc
New Reka Flash model - I’m excited to see them ticking along, doing what looks like good work making evals then improving on them (e.g. longer context, instruction…
Oct 7, 2024

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Tab Clearning (September 23 2024)

misc
https://openai.com/global-affairs/openai-academy/: “Investing in the development of local AI talent can fuel economic growth and innovation across sectors like healthcare…
Sep 23, 2024

Doodling In Hardware

mini-hw-projects
I wanted to do something physical. Maybe a motion system that’s not just another cartesian X/Y thing? Something I can test out Kalman filters and control systems on?…
Sep 14, 2024

TIL: Kalman Filters

tils
This is a notebook I used to explore the topic of Kalman Filters, while attending a talk on the same. You can see I leveraged AI heavily - the presentation here is roughly…
Sep 8, 2024

Min P Sampling: Balancing Creativity and Coherence (paper explanation + code)

Video

exploring min-p sampling

Aug 30, 2024

Single-Pixel Camera (Hardware)

mini-hw-projects
Taking photos one pixel at a time is a funny idea. It’s been done a few tmes (e.g. https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/photoresistor-based-single-pixel-camera/, love the…
Aug 21, 2024

Building Silly Projects with FastHTML

Blog
We’ve been working on FastHTML, a web app framework that makes it easy to build web apps with Python. In the process, I personally have learnt a lot about how the web works…
Aug 21, 2024

Computational Linguistics

Blog
LLMs are cool - we can make them do all sorts of tricks. But beyond the generative applications there’s a whole bunch of interesting linguistic analysis we can do…
Aug 19, 2024
 

What You Should Read (AI Edition)

Blog
There have been hundreds of thousands of films made. But if you reveal that you haven’t seen Star Wars, you’re regarded with a mixture of sympathy and scorn. In this…
Aug 14, 2024

Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models: Paper run-throughs for ‘Chameleon’ and ‘MoMa’

Video

Text-only LLMs are great, and we’ve seen people pasting on some image support here and there, but the future it seems is multi-modal. What does it take to train models from scratch that take in both images and text (and more)? In this video we look at two key papers from FAIR at Meta, introducing their Chameleon approach and making it more efficient with mixture of experts.

Aug 13, 2024

Robot Arm Shenanigans (Draft Post)

mini-hw-projects
I built a fun little robot arm based on designs from here. It’s fun to play with. My favourite workflow is teaching movements by first pupeteering motions then playing those…
Aug 6, 2024
 

Tab Clearing

Blog
Writing down quick takeaways/impressions as I clear up some of my reading backlog
Jun 27, 2024

LLM Steganography: Hiding Messages in Text

Video
Using LLMs to hide secret messages in generated text.
Jun 20, 2024

More=Better?

Blog
In this post I want to share a few quick experiments to show something that is both obvious and also perhaps underappreciated: you can get a sizeable quality boost from a…
May 8, 2024

Basement Hydroponics: Part 1

mini-hw-projects
I’ve been dabbling with hydroponics in my basement since discovering some unused grow lights from someone else’s abandoned attempt. It’s fun to see things grow! The system…
Apr 27, 2024

TIL: Intercepting Github Copilot with MITMProxy

TILs
We’ve been messing with integrating AI into notebook coding, and got curious about how Github Copilot structures the context it uses to generate code when called from a…
Apr 19, 2024

DIY Bio: A Cool Hobby, Not Quite For Me

mini-hw-projects
I’ve been dabbling with DIY biology, trying to modify some genes in ecoli and generally just messing about. Doing something like “making bacteria/yeast that glow under UV”…
Mar 30, 2024

Mini Experiment: Broken Multimodal Telephone

mini-projects
At a birthday party recently we played a game where a pad of paper is passed around a circle, with each person writing a sentence to describe a picture. The next person then…
Mar 14, 2024

Can LLMs estimate the length of a sequence?

mini-projects
While discussing another paper based around ‘LLM-as-a-judge’ style evaluation, the topic of length bias (longer responses tend to be rated higher) came up. This prompted…
Feb 20, 2024

Exploring 3D-Printed Instruments

mini-hw-projects
I’ve built up a bit of a collection of 3D-printed instruments:
Feb 2, 2024

Door Desk

mini-hw-projects
I’m slowly getting the basement organised into a nice workspace. In addition to my primary desk I wanted a standing workbench for soldering and other messy work. A scrap…
Jan 27, 2024

A few tips for working on high-surface-area problems

Blog
Some of my posts will now be duplicated to Answer.ai’s blog since I work there now. This one has just gone up (12 April) but since it has sat as a draft since January I’m…
Jan 23, 2024

TIL: GPT4-V Doesn’t Support Function Calling, but We Can Hack Around That

TILs
I want to use GPT4-V to evaluate images generated by a diffusion model and optionally modify the prompt based on the result. The problem is that GPT4-V doesn’t support…
Jan 1, 2024

Quick Experiment: Filtering Preference Data for Better DPO

blogs
With recent discussion around DPO (and proposed alternatives cDPO and IPO) I figured it was time we ran some experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. As a good…
Dec 6, 2023

Paperathon #1

Video
An experimental livestream reading through papers. A tidy version of the notes from the stream can be found here. Thanks to those who joined the live stream and helped out…
Nov 29, 2023

ZipLoRA: Any Subject in Any Style (deep dive and paper explanation)

Video
In this video we talk about merging LoRAs - the difficulties with a naive approach and the benefits of the new “ZipLoRA” technique. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13600
Nov 26, 2023

Mini Work Timer

mini-hw-projects
I lose track of time easily, so I’m trialling a little timer widget on my desk. Good for regulating Twitter breaks.
Nov 20, 2023

MLOps Community Mini Summit #3 Talk: What The Kaggle LLM Science Exam Competition Can Teach Us About LLMs

Video
Come for the LLM insights, and stay for the Llama-filled slides :)
Nov 16, 2023
 

Getting My YouTube Videos as MarkDown pages for this Quarto blog

TILs
Step 1 was getting the video info:
Nov 7, 2023

Evaluating Diffusion Models with PickScore

Video
Setting the scene for some future videos where I’ll explore ways to improve diffusion models through various tricks. Here we learn why evaluating diffusion models is hard…
Oct 23, 2023

How I ‘monetized’ an AI demo

Video

Creating a minimal template for charging users to run a custom AI pipeline.

Oct 18, 2023

Text-to-3D-Print

mini-hw-projects
Describe -> choose picture -> splats -> mesh -> sculpt -> slice -> print -> paint 😸
Sep 13, 2023

Mini Experiment: DoLa w/ a guidance scale

mini-projects
DoLa contrasts early and late layers of a transformer to elicit more ‘factual’ responses by looking at the contrast between the two. The theory is that earlier layers focus…
Sep 13, 2023

Mini Experiment: Hiding Easter-Eggs in LLMs

mini-projects
I just tried fine-tuning an LLM on a single sample to add an easter egg (Llama 2 7B + Platypus, using LoRA). I bet there are models floating around out there that have…
Sep 6, 2023

Gaussian Splatting explorations

Video
Let’s dive into Gaussian Splatting - what is it, how are scenes represented, and what fun things can we do with itThis is a fairly informal and code-heavy video - let me…
Sep 5, 2023

LLM basics #4 with the LLM Science Exam Kaggle Competition - Retrieval

Video
In this (delayed) final video of the series, we take a lightning look at one more useful technique to add to your submission arsenal - document retrieval.Finding the closest…
Sep 1, 2023

What is Speculative Sampling

Video
A quick explainer video for a technique called ‘speculative sampling’ or ‘assisted generation’ which speeds up language model sampling through the use of a smaller ‘draft’…
Sep 1, 2023
 

Exporting from Wordpress into a Quarto Blog

TILs
I have been blogging for years on a free Wordpress account, but figured I should finally migrate to a custom setup. I’m using Quarto, and in this TIL I document how to…
Aug 11, 2023

LLM basics #3 with the LLM Science Exam Kaggle Competition - Training a task-specific model for MCQs

Video
How do we adapt a model to solve multiple-choice questions In this video we dive into how AutoModelForMultipleChoice actually works, exploring the data processing and then…
Aug 10, 2023

LLM basics #2 with the LLM Science Exam Kaggle Competition - Generating Synthetic Data

Video
Another informal video as we work through the LLM Science Exam competition. Showing how you can - Start with a small dataset of high-quality examples- Train an LLM to…
Aug 9, 2023

LLM basics #1 with the LLM Science Exam Kaggle Competition - Zero-Shot approaches

Video
Talking about ways to use an off-the-shelf language model to solve a multiple-choice task. Covering – Intro to the Kaggle competition- Benchmarking with GPT3.5- Using the…
Aug 7, 2023

Exploring Softmax1, or “Community Research For The Win!”

blogs
Last week a guy called Evan Miller tweeted out a blog post claiming to have discovered a flaw in the attention mechanism used by transformers today:
Aug 4, 2023

Bark To Bark: Adding Noise Control to a Game

mini-projects
I found a game called ‘Russian Subway Dogs’ which is a ton of fun. I made a script to trigger the dog to bark in the game. Original Tweet with code link
Jul 30, 2023
 

Why and how I’m shifting focus to LLMs

blogs
While I’ve previously consulted on NLP projects, in the past few years my research focus has been chiefly on images. If you had asked me a few months ago about looking at…
Jul 1, 2023

A Recipe for Training Good Generative Models

blogs
Generative models are all the rage at the moment, and quality seems to be skyrocketing across the board. In this post, I share what I’m realizing is *the* key recipe that is…
Apr 6, 2023

Reward Hacking with RainbowDiffusion

mini-projects
An experiment incorpoarting an aesthetic model as part of the training loss went wring in all the right ways! And my boss let me release the result on huggingface :)
Apr 4, 2023

Style Loss Showdown

mini-projects
Reports
Remember Style Transfer? Turns out we can make it a lot better by moving away from Gram matrices! In this report, I dig into some alternative style losses including a…
Mar 2, 2023

Stylizing Video with Diffusion Models

Video

Reviewing existing techniques, introducing coherence guidance and running through the GEN1 Paper from RunwayML.

Feb 15, 2023

A Deep Dive Into OpenCLIP from OpenAI

Reports

This article explores an open re-implementation of OpenAI’s CLIP model for zero-shot classification and covers its additional uses and its potential issues.

Feb 13, 2023

InstructPix2Pix Explained - Edit Images with Words!

Video
Join me as I explain the core idea behind ‘InstructPix2Pix’ which let’s you edit images using natural language instructions!The thumbnail was generated with ‘Add…
Feb 3, 2023

Stable Diffusion Deep Dive Notebook Run-through

Video
In this video/notebook Johno shows us what is happening behind the scenes when we create an image with Stable Diffusion, looking at the different components and processes…
Jan 30, 2023

Genuary 2023

mini-projects
I did a few code doodles for Genuary 2023. Preview videos here.
Jan 15, 2023

Podcast E6 - Wasim Lorgat

Video
Wasim talks us through his approach to learning and building projects, touching on NBDev, building on big AI models like CLIP, his project ‘Meepo’, plans for building a new…
Jan 10, 2023

Mid-U Guidance: Fast Classifier Guidance for Latent Diffusion Models

Reports

Introducing a new method for diffusion model guidance with various advantages over existing methods, demonstrated by adding aesthetic guidance to Stable Diffusion.

Jan 10, 2023

DistilHN: Summarizing News Articles with Transformers

blogs
https://youtu.be/TBqzMfWpQrs
Dec 30, 2022

Building DistilHN - Using ML to Summarize News Articles

Video
Website - https://www.distilhn.com/Blog post - https://datasciencecastnet.home.blog/2022/12/30/distilhn-summarizing-news-articles-with-transformers/Code -…
Dec 30, 2022

HuggingFace Class

Video
Unit 2 - Fintuning and Guidance (casual notebook walkthough),Looking through the notebooks for the huggingface diffusion models class, unit 2 -…
Dec 23, 2022

HuggingFace Diffusion Model Class

Video

Unit 1 runthrough for the HuggingFace Diffusion Model Class

Dec 22, 2022

Editing Images with Diffusion Models (lit review _ overview of different approaches)

Video
How can we use diffusion models to edit existing images rather than generating completely new images1) Add some noise, denoise with a new prompt- VQGAN + CLIP paper -…
Nov 22, 2022

TGL Discussion Series - Hamel Husain

Video
In this video, I chat with Hamel Husain, a Machine Learning Engineer/Data Scientist passionate about making tools. Hamel is one of the most helpful and interesting people…
Nov 13, 2022

TGL Discussion Series - Teodora Szasz

Video
Talking with Teodora about her work as a Computational Scientist working on everything from medical AI to satellite-based archaeology to her most recent work on…
Nov 10, 2022

TGL Discussion Series - Jason Antic

Video
Jason is the creator of the incredible ‘DeOldify’ application for restoring historical photos, and one of the best experimentalists I’ve met. In this conversation we chat a…
Nov 10, 2022

TGL Discussions Series - Apolinario Passos

Video
Chatting with ML Art Engineer Apolinario Passos about keeping up with this fast-moving field, tips for getting involved, his journey to working on ML art full time and…
Nov 10, 2022

TGL Discussions Series - @EnzymeZoo

Video
@EnzymeZoo is an artist and developer. In this discussion, we chat about the community development work that goes into creating a tool like the Deforum notebook…
Nov 10, 2022

How Predictable: Evaluating Song Lyrics with Language Models

blogs
I was briefly nerd-sniped this morning by the following tweet:
Oct 25, 2022

Progressive Distillation for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models (paper sumary)

Video
Having a bash explaining https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00512 (and the follow-on paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03142) I’ve been busy working on…
Oct 11, 2022

Summarising Neuromatch Deep Learning Course in 20 minutes

Video
An overview of the content covered by the NMA Deep Learning course. This material is freely available online, so if this video sparks an interest do go and check it out -…
Aug 1, 2022

Mapping Econimic Wellbeing from Space

Reports

Can you tell how wealthy a place is from space? It turns out that this is a very important question - an answer of ‘yes’ would mean that we can figure out how wealth is distributed within a country without needing to run expensive national surveys. For this project, I’ll be attempting to do exactly this, recreating some recent research to map poverty across Africa using existing household surveys and remote sensing data.

Jul 19, 2022

Paper exploration - Making Diffusion Models go BRRR!

Video
(Audio cuts for a minute but resumes at 4/55 - sorry about that)In this video we take a look at the paper ‘Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models’…
Jun 24, 2022

AIAIART #9 - Evolutionary Algorithms and CPPNs

Video
CPPNs (not CPNNs as I say throughout the video!!) Compositional Pattern-Producing Networks! How embarrassing -)In this, the final lesson of AIAIART Part 2, we take a very…
Jun 13, 2022
 

WhistleGen V2: Making Music With Transformers

Reports

This article will dive into how the second version of WhistleGen works and explores how it enables you to generate folk music in ABC notation using minGPT.

Jun 2, 2022

Update Time

blogs
A few recent projects I’ve worked on have been documented elsewhere but haven’t made it to this blog. The point of this post is to summarize these so that they aren’t lost…
May 27, 2022

Fun With Neural Cellular Automata

Reports

In this article, we take a look at how to make pretty pictures (and videos!) using differentiable self-organizing systems.

May 22, 2022

AIAIART #8 - Neural Cellular Automata

Video
In which we discover the amazing world of Neural Cellular Automata, and see how to train them to match a style, a text description or an input image. Notebook link -…
May 16, 2022

CLOOB Conditioned Latent Denoising Diffusion Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

Reports

In this article, we’ll look at Image Generation with CLOOB Conditioned Latent Denoising Diffusion Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), or CCLDDG, for short.

May 9, 2022

AIAIART Lesson 7.5

Video
Informal chat where we read through a few papers and look at a recent project. No central notebook for this lesson, but some resources we’ll be talking about – A brief…
May 8, 2022

AIAIART Lesson #7 - Diffusion Models

Video
Time to dive into diffusion models and see what is going on underneath the magic that is making the news at the moment -)If you’d prefer a slightly longer, more…
May 3, 2022

AIAIART Lesson 6

Video
AIAIART Lesson 6, diving into transformer models and their application to image synthesis. We’ll start by playing with text generation and build all the way up to creating…
Apr 17, 2022

Fine-tuning a CLOOB-Conditioned Latent Diffusion Model on WikiArt

blogs
Prompt: ‘A sunset landscape painting, oil on canvas’ (fine-tuned Wikiart model)
Apr 12, 2022

AIAIART Lesson #5

Video
Welcome back to AIAIART! This lesson recaps some of the core ideas from part 1 (lessons 1-4) and sets us up for the next few weeks, where we’ll look into some advanced new…
Apr 11, 2022

HugGAN sprint - demo project

Video
Come along for an informal look at making something for the #huggan sprint. We – Create a dataset and upload it to the huggingface hub- Train a model on that dataset- Work…
Apr 5, 2022

Sketchy Unet

blogs
The model demo running on Huggingface Spaces
Mar 29, 2022

Turtle Recall: A Contrastive Learning Approach

blogs
NB: A scoring glitch caused this approach to look very good on the leaderboard, but local validation and a fix from Zindi later confirmed that it isn’t as magical as it…
Feb 18, 2022

Come along for the ride as I dive into an ML contest (MABe 2 on AICROWD)

Video
A long rambly video as I pick a contest and put together a series of entries getting up to the top of the leaderboard. The first ~20 minutes is mostly checking out some…
Feb 15, 2022

AI Art Showreel (Jan 2022)

Video
A little taste of some of the things I’ve worked on over the past year -)More detail on many projects shown here can be found on my art twitter account…
Jan 19, 2022

AIAIART Course Retrospective

blogs
A small selection of images generated during the course
Nov 24, 2021

Playing with Tweet Sentiment Analysis

blogs
The average sentiment of the most recent 200 tweets from each country’s capital city.
Nov 9, 2021

AIAIART Lesson #4 (Live session recording)

Video
AIAIART lesson #4, the final lesson in this series. We go over some applications of the techniques covered in previous lessons and give ideas for things to try next.…
Oct 18, 2021

AIAIART Lesson #3

Video

Video run-through of Lesson 3 of the AIAIART course.

Oct 16, 2021

AIAIART Lesson 2

Video

Video run-through of Lesson 2 of the AIAIART course.

Sep 28, 2021

AIAIART Lesson 1

Video

Video for lesson 1 of the AIAIART course

Sep 20, 2021

‘Mars Affair’

Video
Music video created by me for David Ker aka @dadsalad2020. Made with GANs and love.
Aug 10, 2021

Getting to Grips with AI ART

Video
Taking a peek at some of the AI art stuff happening at the moment. How does it work, where can we go with it and what have I been working on. Sections -00/00 -…
Jul 21, 2021

Competition Attempts - ADDi Alzheimers Detection Challenge

Video
A quick overview of the ADDi Alzheimers Detection Challenge. Overview of the data, tips for improving your score and comparing models, visualizations of some of the cocks…
May 20, 2021

WhistleGen: Generating Traditional Irish music with ML

blogs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7SEP2p4Y1A
May 13, 2021

In Brief: Playing with Class Imbalance

blogs
We often encounter imbalanced data in the world of machine learning, and have to decide how best to handle this. In ‘real life’ it is up to us to decide how to evaluate…
May 13, 2021

BirdClef Entry: Bird Call Classification with FastAI

blogs
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology run an annual competition to identify bird calls in soundscapes. I decided to have a go at this year’s competition to get back into audio…
Apr 22, 2021

Competition Attempts - MABE Challenge first thoughts

Video
Documenting my first experiments as I attempt the MABE Challenge on AICrowd…
Apr 22, 2021

Competition attempts - BirdClef 2021 Initial Approach

Video
An introduction to the BirdClef Challenge and my first baseline entry. We – Look at the audio data- Introduce spectrograms- Look at ways to pick clips with high…
Apr 22, 2021

Meet DotSwarm - A Slime-Mould-Inspired Shader

Video

A webgl slime mould simulation.

Mar 29, 2021

Days of Code 2 - WhistleGen - generating Irish music with machine learning

Video
Generating and playing some ‘traditional Irish style’ music with code. This video covers scraping the tunes, training a model and turning the output into music. Try it…
Mar 25, 2021

Days of Code - Intro and Recap of the first few weeks

Video

Sharing the first few weeks of my ‘days of code’ project

Mar 25, 2021

Language Models for Protein Sequence Classification

blogs
A 3D model of a protein kinase
Oct 30, 2020

Data Glimpse: Predicted Historical Air Quality for African Cities

blogs
Air quality has been in the news a lot recently. Smoke from fires has had thousands of Californians searching for info around the health hazards of particulate matter…
Sep 16, 2020

Personal Metrics

blogs
This is just a quick post following on from some recent conversations in this area. tldr: Tracking some data about yourself is a great exercise, and I highly recommend it.…
Aug 12, 2020
 

Update: Why the pause?

blogs
It’s been nearly four months since my last post on this blog. I’d like to get back into writing things up here, but before putting up another normal post I figured it was…
Jun 16, 2020

Self-Supervised Learning with Image网

blogs
Until fairly recently, deep learning models needed a LOT of data to get decent performance. Then came an innovation called transfer learning, which we’ve covered in some…
Feb 22, 2020

Meta ‘Data Glimpse’ - Google Dataset Search

blogs
Christmas came in January this year, with Google’s release of ‘Dataset Search’. They’ve indexed millions of cool datasets and made it easy to search through them. This post…
Feb 5, 2020

Swoggle Part 2 - Building a Policy Network with PyTorch, dealing with Cheaty Agents and ‘Beating’ the Game

blogs
In part 1, we laid the groundwork for our Reinforcement Learning experiments by creating a simple game (Swoggle) that we’d be trying to teach out AI to play. We also created…
Jan 24, 2020

Swoggle Part 1- RL Environments and Literate Programming with NBDev

blogs
I’m going to be exploring the world of Reinforcement Learning. But there will be no actual RL in this post - that’s for part two. This post will do two things: describe the…
Jan 20, 2020

Behind the scenes of a Zindi Contest

blogs
User comments
Jan 16, 2020

Snapshot Serengeti - Working with Large Image Datasets

blogs
Driven Data launched a competition around the Snapshot Serengeti database - something I’ve been intending to investigate for a while. Although the competition is called…
Nov 29, 2019

Deep Learning + Remote Sensing - Using NNs to turn imagery into meaningful features

blogs
Every now and again, the World Bank conducts something called a Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) survey in different countries, with the purpose being to learn…
Nov 12, 2019

Zindi UberCT Part 3: Uber Movement

blogs
Uber Movement has launched in Cape Town
Oct 29, 2019

Zindi UberCT Part 2: Stepping Up

blogs
In part 1, we looked at the SANRAL challenge on Zindi and got a simple first submission up on the leaderboard. In this tutorial I’ll show some extra features you can add on…
Oct 21, 2019

Zindi UberCT Part 1: Getting started

blogs
Welcome to the first in a three-part series on Zindi’s Uber Movement SANRAL Cape Town Challenge. This tutorial will take a look at the challenge, start exploring the data…
Oct 19, 2019

Packaging a classification model as a web app

blogs
My shiny new web app, available here
Sep 12, 2019

Pothole Detection (aka Johno tries fastai)

blogs
This week saw folks from all over the AI space converge in Cape Town for the AI Expo. The conference was inspiring, and I had a great time chatting to all sorts of…
Sep 6, 2019

Trying Automated ML

blogs
Some students had asked me for my opinion on automated tools for machine learning. The thought occurred that I hadn’t done much with them recently, and it was about time I…
Aug 27, 2019

Mapping Change in Cropland in Zimbabwe (Part 2)

blogs
In Part 1, I showed a quick way to get a model that predicts cropland extent, using someone else’s model as a starting point. This was a fun exercise, but in today’s post…
Aug 7, 2019

Mapping Change in Cropland in Zimbabwe (Part 1)

blogs
I’m going to be working on a project that will ultimately require manually outlining tobacco fields in Zimbabwe. To help locate potential fields, it would be nice to have a…
Jul 14, 2019

Data Glimpse: Cropland and Settlement maps from QED.AI

blogs
The point of this Data Glimpse post is to feature a wonderful yet badly publicized data source: https://maps.qed.ai/. Using crowd-sourced data, they built really accurate…
Jul 13, 2019

Data Glimpse: Nighttime Lights

blogs
This ‘Data Glimpse’ post will look at the Global Radiance-Calibrated Nighttime Lights dataset [1], available through Google Earth Engine. However, the method shown here can…
Jul 8, 2019

Data Glimpse: South Africa’s Hydrological Data

blogs
South Africa’s Department of Water Affairs (DWA) makes all kinds of data publicly available through their data portal: http://www.dwa.gov.za/hydrology/. The download…
Jul 7, 2019

Data Glimpse: Visualizing Economic Activity with the G-Econ Project data

blogs
This is the first ‘data glimpse’ - a short exploration of an existing dataset, with code and examples showing some of the ways the data can be used. For today’s glimpse…
Jun 28, 2019

Tutorial: Improving Crop Type Predictions

blogs
Following on from the last tutorial, this post will look at some ways we can improve our crop identification method. At the end of the last post, we were using a CART…
Jun 27, 2019

Tutorial: Predicting Crop Types with GEE

blogs
Zindi is currently hosting a competition to classify fields by crop type using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. They provide labeled fields with the crop type, and a separate…
Jun 26, 2019

New Database: Forest Change in Different Regions

blogs
Forest loss is a major problem facing many parts of the world right now. Trees are being cleared to make way for agriculture, or simply cut down for fuel and timber.…
Jun 19, 2019

Zindi Competition 1 - Making Art!

blogs
I’m going to try entering some Zindi competitions this week. First up is the ‘AI Art’ contest. I have many crazy plans, but my nascent tensorflow skills mean everything…
Jun 11, 2019

Zindi Competition 2 - Trying CatBoost on the Traffic Jam Challenge

blogs
Zindi ran a challenge predicting bus ticket sales into Nairobi. It is now closed, but we can still make predictions and see how they would have done. This was a very quick…
Jun 11, 2019

Looking at traffic/congestion vs air quality AKA a quest for data

blogs
I’m currently on a mission to explore the different datasets available publicly, and hopefully to add to that list. One key reason I’m passionate about this is that data…
Jun 7, 2019

ML and IR Tomography

blogs
I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCT, and the final year project was my chance to really dive deep into a topic. I chose IR tomography, and explored various…
May 17, 2019

Mapping Baobabs, Part 3 - Model Applicability

blogs
In the previous two posts, we built a Species Distribution Model and used it to predict the density of Baobab trees in Zimbabwe. Then we tried some more complex models…
Mar 12, 2019

Mapping Baobabs, Part 2 - Qualifying Model Performance and More Complex Models

blogs
Update, July 2020: GEE now has a good random forest implementation (ee.Classifier.smileRandomForest) that can do regression - I’d suggest using that instead of the approach…
Mar 7, 2019
 

Mapping Baobabs, Part 1 - Modelling the Density of Baobab Trees in Zimbabwe with a Linear Model in GEE

blogs
This is the first in a multi-part series exploring Species Distribution Modelling (SDM) with the Google Earth Engine. In this post, we’ll take a look at the data we’ll be…
Feb 15, 2019

Christmas games - simulation and lazy stats

blogs
This Christmas, I was introduced to several new games by my new extended family. Much fun was had making up new games and rediscovering old, but one game annoyed me…
Jan 22, 2019

Curious correlations

blogs
I wanted to write this up to show how easy it is becoming to test ideas and find interesting trends in data. Please don’t draw too many conclusions from the numbers here -…
Jan 22, 2019
 

init(self): What is this blog

blogs
Welcome!
Jan 11, 2019

CIRTS - Configurable Infra-Red Tomography systems

mini-hw-projects
Using cheap IR LEDs and phototransistors to understand tomography. Using machine learning to make inferences based on sensor data. Etc :)
Nov 16, 2018

Owning a 3D printer

mini-hw-projects
I got my first 3D printer in 2018. It was a Creality Ender 3. I printed a lot of parts for my own projects but also paid off the cost of the printer by printing parts for…
Jul 1, 2018

Studying automation with an octopus overlord!

mini-hw-projects
It’s easy to automate machines, harder to automate myself. So I made this - a glorified countdown timer keeping me focused on studying :)
Jul 24, 2016

Mini PCB printer

mini-hw-projects
Melting toner (as etch resist) directly onto copper clad board using a laser moved by a DVD drive XY system.
Jun 4, 2016

Scanning EIT Imaging System (SEITIS) Attempt

mini-hw-projects
A failed attempt to make a scanning electrical impedance tomography system. Built from old printer parts, I had the motion stage (jankily) working and some of the…
Apr 9, 2016

Pimp my dormroom

mini-hw-projects
Ah yes, what every dorm room needs is cardboard furniture, DIY storage and tons of tools. Good memories :) More pics at https://hackaday.io/project/9372/gallery.
Jan 28, 2016

Cell Phone Oscilloscope

mini-hw-projects
A preamp to use a cellphone mic input as a basic oscilloscope. Protects the phone from nasty voltages. <40V, <20kHz.
Jun 29, 2015

Micromouse attempt

mini-hw-projects
I tried to build a micromouse, but let the magic smoke out the day of the competition. As was my style at the time the guts were a bare bones ATMega328 that I’d got as…
Jul 3, 2014

Kwese - musical instrument

mini-hw-projects
Capacitive touch-based instrument / midi controller. Similar to a makey-makey. Created for a hackathon. My first introduction to the brutal reality that you can’t in fact…
Jun 17, 2014

Mini Laser Cutter

mini-hw-projects
Tiny laser cutter built out of broken DVD drive parts.
Mar 20, 2014

Electronic Bagpipes

mini-hw-projects
I made an OpenChanter-based electronic bagpipe, with capacitive touch on screws where the holes would typically be.
Mar 20, 2014

Multitouch Surface

mini-hw-projects

Whipped up a quick DIY multitouch thingee - really cool to play with and cost $0 (not bad considering Microsofts commercial alternative costs $12000!). Uses an open source program called CCV to process the video feed from my IR camera in the bottom of a box. The box is covered by a piece of perspex and a sheet of paper. By analysing the shadows on the paper the fingers can be detected. I also set a projector in the box so that you see the screen react as you touch it.

Jan 1, 2014

DIY Cellphone Macro Lens

mini-hw-projects

Found an easy and free way to take amazing macro shots with your cellphone using the lense from inside a DVD player. Pics and long explanation in ‘more details’ (warning, large ~2MB images)

Dec 1, 2013

Laptop in a briefcase

mini-hw-projects

After I managed to get my hands on an old laptop, I wanted to try my hand at making it into a “picture-frame” display, as seen all over the web. However, with the power of a (n admittadly derelict) laptop at your disposal it seems a bit of a waste if all you want is a slide-show. In addition, my mother didn’t look too happy with the idea of me liberating a frame from one of her pictures.

Oct 2, 2013

Junk VDG

mini-hw-projects

I threw together a Van de Graaff generator out of stuff lying around. It worked, but the whole point was that by doing everything wrong I can now explain how it should have been done. Check out the full article for the details.

Sep 2, 2013

Easy 3D Scanner

mini-hw-projects

How cool would it be to be able to scan objects in 3D? Turns out its not hard, and can be done with stuff you probably have lying around the house. I made mine using a cheap laser pointer, a broken wine glass stem (sorry mum :) and some cool software -makerscanner. This is a piece of software designed specifically for their design, but I will explain how to adapt it if you don’t have a 3D printer. I also usedMeshlabandBlenderto clean up the results.

Aug 3, 2013

IR Webcam

mini-hw-projects

When I found out this was possible I couldn’t resist having a go. Sadly, I didn’t document the build process but there are many tutorials out there already explaining all the details. A short explanation and some more pics in ‘more details’.

Jul 4, 2013
 

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mini-projects
Jan 1, 2010
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