Baby Don't Hertz Me

Despite all the woes around internet accessibility and net neutrality occurring in the USA in recent times, the internet remains a modern marvel. Sure, there is always the risk of your data being sold (if it isn't already) but in exchange you gain access to the majority of humankind's knowledge. All of our joy, sorrow, science and math. The internet is an endless supply of data and learning. It isn't all about making pretty graphs like you might find on /r/dataisbeautiful but amazing stuff can be done regardless. The massive amounts of data accessible on the internet will allow for the identification of the driving forces of certain actions. As can be seen below, Bitcoin prices correlate very nicely with Google searches relating to it. From /r/dataisbeautiful and /u/DeanLa As my second last semester in university wraps up I realize the true power of data. In a course I took about pattern recognition and machine learning we got to see first hand what can happen wit...

Humans have an enormous variety of ways to interact with the world around them. Touch, smell, taste, hearing, but most important (in my mind) is vision. Computers are presently limited in their interactions with the world. They are allowed to crunch numbers, post a Facebook status that none of your friends want to read but ultimately don't get to touch, taste, smell, or see the world around them. One thing that I find fascinating is object recognition using neural networks. I am currently taking a class with a focus on pattern recognition and machine learning where we have to do a project of our choosing. My classmate and I are comparing performance of traditional classification and deep learning for object detection (in our case an orange hockey ball). I was extremely happy when our prof approved the usage of deep learning despite the focus of the course being more on traditional classifying techniques. The project work division is that my classmate is developing the traditional...