Everybody’s favorite show about bloody power struggles and dragons, Game of Thrones, is back for its seventh season. And since we’re such big GoT fans here, we just had to do a project on analyzing data from the hit HBO show. You might not expect it, but the show is rife with data and has […]
In April, I gave a talk at d3.bayarea(). Here’s an adaptation of that talk as an introduction to d3.annotation(). LIBRARY BASICS I started this library by gathering examples of annotations that I liked. From those examples, the majority of use cases followed a pattern: a subject(the thing the annotation is annotating), a note, and a connector joining the note to the […]
When I started writing about methods for better “parametric programming” interfaces for dplyr for R dplyr users in December of 2016 I encountered three divisions in the audience: dplyr users who had such a need, and wanted such extensions. dplyr users who did not have such a need (“we always know the column names”). dplyr users who found the then-current fairly complex “underscore” and lazyeval system […]
Editor’s Note: Calum will speak on AI at ODSC’s Europe based Summit on Accelerating Businesses with AI this October of 2017. Information can be found at ai.odsc.com/. I believe the 21st century is the most interesting time to be alive – and the most important. If humanity survives it intact, our future is glorious. […]
Introduction Chatbots are “computer programs which conduct conversation through auditory or textual methods”. Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa are four of the most popular conversational agents today. They can help you get directions, check the scores of sports games, call people in your address book, and can accidently make you order a $170 dollhouse. These products all […]
Kaggle are running a regression machine learning competition with Mercedes-Benz right now, it closes in a week and runs for about 6 weeks overall. I’ve managed to squeeze in 5 days to have a play (I managed about 10 days on the previous Quora competition). My goal this time was to focus on new tools that make it […]
A cautionary tutorial. Perhaps you heard about Tay, Microsoft’s experimental Twitter chat-bot, and how within a day it became so offensive that Microsoft had to shut it down and never speak of it again. And you assumed that you would never make such a thing, because you’re not doing anything weird like letting random jerks […]
Or, How We Conceptualize The Invisible Algorithms are everywhere. Sometimes we see traces. Once in a while, we feel the effects. Mostly, we go about our days vaguely aware of an invisible algorithmic presence. The goal: to make invisible algorithms more visible. So, I designed challenges to provide a glimpse into everyday moments and ongoing […]
In this post we’ll provide a general introduction to machine learning, which tries to highlight the underlying technical challenges and where we have solutions. Machine learning is the principle technology underpinning the recent advances in artificial intelligence. But what is machine learning? And why is it important? Machine learning is perhaps the principal technology behind […]
