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AIDL Weekly Issue 2 – Gamalon/Batch Renormalization/TF 1.0/Oxford Deep NLP

Issue 2  

Editorial

Thoughts From Your Humble Curators

How to create a good A.I. newsletter? What first comes to everybody’s mind is to simply aggregate a lot of links. This is very common in deep learning resource lists, say “Cool List of XX in Deep Learning”. Our experience is that you usually have to sift through 100-200 links and decide which are useful.

We believe there is a better way: In AIDL Weekly, we only choose important news and always provide detailed analysis on each of them. For example, here we take a look at newsworthy Gamalon, it is known to use a ground-breaking method to outperform deep learning and win a defense contract recently. What is the basis of its technology? We cover this in a deep dive in the “News” section.

Or you can take a look of the exciting development of batch renormalization that tackles its current shortcomings. Anyone who does normalization in training will likely benefit from the paper.

Last week, we also saw the official release of Tensorflow 1.0 as well as the 2017 Official Tensorflow Summit. We prepared two good links so that you can follow. If you love deep learning with NLP, you might also want to check out the new course from Oxford.

As always, check out our FB group, our YouTube channel, of course subscribe this newsletter.

Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning Weekly

News


Blog Posts


Open Source


Video


Member’s Question

Question from a AIDL Member

Q: (Rephrase) I am trying to learn the following languages, (…) to intermediate level, and the following languages, (…) to professional level. Would this be helpful for my career on Data Science/Machine Learning? I have a mind to work on deep learning.”

This is a variation of a frequently asked question. In a nutshell, “how much programming should I learn if I want to work on deep learning?”. The question itself shows misconceptions about programming and machine learning. So we include it in this issue. This is my (Arthur’s) take:

  1. First thing first, usually you first decide which package to work on, if the package use language X, then you go to learn-up language X. e.g. if I want to hack Linux kernel, I would need to know C and learn Linux system calls, and perhaps some assembly language. Learning programming is more like a means to achieve a goal. Echoing J.T. Bowlin’s point, programming language is more like a language, you can always learn more, but there’s a point it seems to be unnecessary.
  2. Then you ask what language should be used to work on deep learning. I will say mathematics, because once you understand the greek symbols, you can translate all these symbols to code (approximately). So if you ask me what you need to learn to hack tensorflow, “Mathematics” would be the first answer, yes, the package is written by Python/C++/C, but they won’t be even close in my top-5 answers. Because if you don’t know what Backprop is, knowing how C++ destructor works can’t make you an expert of TF.
  3. The final thing is you mentioned the term “level”. What does this “level” mean? So is it like chess-rating or go-rating that someone has higher rating, they will have a better career in deep learning? It might work for competitive programming…… but real-life programming doesn’t work that way. Real-life programming means you can read/write a complex programs. e.g. in C++, you use a class instead of repeating a function implementation many times to reduce programming. Same as templates. That’s why class and templates are important concept and people debate their usages a lot. How can you give “levels” to such skills?

Lastly I would say if you seriously want to focus on one language, consider python, but always learn a new programming language yearly. Also pick up some side-projects, both your job and side-projects would usually give you ideas which language you should learn more.

Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning Weekly

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