New job and two deep dives into tech

I haven't written a public blog post in four months because I have been busy moving to another state and starting a new job at Capital One (Master Software Engineer, role is tech lead and manager of a small machine learning team). Life has been really good: excitement of new job challenges and Carol and I have been enjoying the university town of Urbana/Champaign Illinois.

I am also finishing up two course specializations at Coursera: Probabilistic Graph Models and Deep Learning. The deep learning class series is just a review for me, and in contrast I find the PGM class series very challenging (I am taking these PGM classes at a slow and relaxed pace - Coursera lets you split classes to multiple sessions).

I am reading two books that I can highly recommend: François Chollet's book "Deep Learning with Python" that serves as an idea book for advance use of deep learning using Keras. François is the creator of the Keras framework and his new book is a treasure store of new ideas and techniques.

I am also (slowly) reading "Deep Learning" by Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville. This book aims to be a self-contained reference for deep learning, including a very good prelude containing all the math you need to understand the rest of the book.

I have been taking pictures in the area around Urbana/Champaign. Yes, it is flat here but still beautiful and a nice place to live. I will post some pictures soon.

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