Knime conference coming up

Next week the KNIME fall conference will be happening, Nov 14-16. For mathematicians or anyone wanting to look at some useful AI/Machine learning tools, this should be an informative conference! I’ve seen some previous sessions with interesting demos and overviews of new features they add to this open-source tool. Virtual passes are free to the live-streamed event! If it is like past online lessons, it is likely they will also be available later from their Youtube channel page.

Update: Check the videos here!

The Master Algorithm Book Review

In The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos, the author has some interesting thoughts on the “master algorithm”. Just like physicists want to find a universal formula for everything, a similar quest is what some in the machine learning world are looking for, and could simplify or bring new insights to how the world works through collected data. Just as many useful algorithms can be used in different ways – for example a super simple neural net can find pi, or a neural net can tell the difference between a dog and a cat, why can’t there be one that could run all machine learning problems?

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Human pose estimation with Python and Gluoncv

Human pose estimation is something useful for robotics/programming as you can see what position a person is in a picture. For last weekend’s Hackrithmitic I did an experiment for fun using computer vision pose estimation. To start with I found several possibilities with available libraries:

  • Tensorflow js has been used to say, don’t touch your face, but it takes a massive amount of cpu.
  • Openpose is a popular one, only licensed for noncommercial research use, and there is a Opencv example for it that doesn’t quite show how to use it.
  • AlphaPose is supposedly faster and has a more clear license and possibility for commercial use – if you want that as a possibility. I checked out the install instructions and worked but for “python3” instead of “python”. It also misses obvious step of installing cuda for your Nvidia system before running.
  • GluonCV is another, which seems more user friendly. This one I was able to get running in a few minutes with their example:
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