My wife and I enjoyed a performance of Sleeping Beauty by the Russian National Ballet Theater last Wednesday night at a theater on campus at UIUC. Every time I enjoy art, company of family and friends, reading a good book, cooking and enjoying a meal, etc. I appreciate being a human (i.e., a somewhat evolved great ape) and my physical and social life. I view technology as a fairly neutral force in our lives. I judge technology on how it improves peoples' lives, health, the health of our planet, and generally how well it supports civil society. As technologists, we get value from being paid for our work and thus helping to support ourselves and our families and to spend money in our local economies (supporting local businesses and directly or indirectly hiring people working in our communities.) We also benefit from any pleasure we get learning new things while working. There are obvious bad aspects of technology and these bad aspects are mostly aligned with corporatism. Whethe

Originally posted January 9, 2019 I hosted a meetup.com meeting today to talk about Ocean Protocol, other data sources for machine learning, and lead a group discussion of startup business ideas involving curating and selling data. The following is from a handout I created from material on the Ocean Protocol web site and other sources: Data Trumps Software Machine learning libraries like TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, etc. and people trained to use them have become a commodity. What is not a commodity yet is the availability of high quality application specific data. Effective machine learning requires quality data Ocean Protocol   https://oceanprotocol.com   - is a ecosystem based on blockchain for sharing data that serves needs for both data producers who want to monetize their data assets and for data consumers who need specific data that is affordable. This ecosystem is still under development but there are portions of the infrastructure (which will all be open source) alr

Originally posted December 8, 2018 We can look forward to a future where the economy wrapped around tech advances overshadows conventional industries like agriculture and manufacturing. Given this context I am disappointed but not surprised that on international math tests students in the USA continue to fall behind their counterparts in the rest of the world. Why is this when there are so many opportunities to learn both in school and as a lifetime pursuit? Given the transformational effect of the Internet on society in general and in particular the economy, I think we are seeing the effects of different peoples’ perception and use of the Internet as a source of entertainment vs. source of information vs. source of knowledge. Mark’s Hierarchy of Internet Use Simplifying this discusion, in increasing order of personal value and value to society, Internet use falls in three broad use cases: Internet as a source of entertainment: there is real value in engaging with friends

Originally posted September 8, 2018 I am interested in using pre-trained deep learning models as functional components in functional languages like Scheme and Haskell. I want to share a simple experiment that I wrote that uses Keras to train a model on the Wisconsin cancer data set (that I have used in the last three years in two books I have written in example programs), saves the weights in CSV files, and then uses those weights in a Racket Scheme program. There are two github repos: optional:   https://github.com/mark-watson/save_keras_for_use_misc_prog_languages   that trains a model and saves the weights Scheme code that includes the CSV weight files:   https://github.com/mark-watson/racket_neural_net_from_keras Sample run: $ racket neural.rkt ** weights loaded ** shape of w2: 64 64 (number correct: 139)(number wrong: 12)(accuracy: 92.05298013245033)

Originally posted August 25, 2018 I read a good article on   Centralized Wins. and Decentralized Loses.   this morning and I commented on Hacker News: I wish it weren’t true but for right now I agree with the author, including what it might take to tip the balance: “1. Complete deterioration of trust such that avoiding the centralization of power becomes a necessity. 4. The decentralization community manages to create clearly superior applications as convenient and reliable as centralized providers.“ I was eager to use GNU Social, and after some use for a year, my host shut down. I just opened another Mastadon account but haven’t started using it yet. Also, the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting people I follow. Social media is best when used as an advertising and directory service for content we put on our own blogs and web sites, but even that seems to be less common. I really enjoyed the Decentralized Web Conference June 2016, but it also m

Originally posted August 19, 2018 Even though I specialize in deep learning at work I sceptical about achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) using only neural networks (of any architecture). My friend and two time colleague Ben Goertzel has been working on a hybrid approach to AGI in the   OpenCog   organization with a large team for many years. AIsentience.net In my personal-time project   AIsentience.net , I have been working on my own hybrid general AI framework for a number of years. Common Lisp is still my favorite language for research programming and the latest edition of my book   Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer’s Secret Weapon contains a section on using Armed Bear Common Lisp With DeepLearning4j. ABCL is implemented in Java and while not as performant as SBCL it offers interop with Java libraries like DeepLearning4j. For now, I am happy enough being able to train specific deep learning models for word2vec, seq2seq, and summarization and write funct

Originally posted June 2, 2018 I do much of my work in SSH shells to remote servers and while I have used Emacs for about 30 years I don’t usually take too much time and effort customizing it. I have recently started using Org mode at work (I am a Master Software Engineer at Capital One and manage a Deep Learning team) and at home. Today after enjoying a Saturday morning gym workout I decided to improve my Emacs setup and this blog article is documentation that I will use in the future for reference. If it saves you some time or gives you useful ideas, even better! I wanted to enable flyspell (which is installed with any current Emacs distribution) for all text modes, and that includes Org mode files. I added the following to my .emacs file: (add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-visual-line-mode) ;; flyspell (dolist (hook '(text-mode-hook)) (add-hook hook (lambda () (f