Travel Visualizations

I've made a simple visualization of where I have and haven't been in the world:

So far, that's 24 countries. I'll keep the map up to date …

Lua Rocks

Inspired by reading [cached]Lua - an extensible extension language, specifically the section on using fallbacks to implement an expression parser, I wanted to see if I could do so in a safe manner. With safe meaning parsed expressions must not be able to execute arbitrary code.

Half an hour later, I have to say it is surprisingly easy! Less than 50 lines (including comments) is all it takes:

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More on Deep Learning

This is more or less just a random collection of links I've come across while researching Deep Learning, I hope they are as useful to you as to me.

[cached]Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology is a great post on how to visualize deep neural networks and get an intuition for them. Reading it was the first time I truly appreciated how the successive layers of NNs just transform the topology of the input data, until finally it becomes linearly separable.

[cached]So You Wanna Try Deep Learning? has a good collection of papers, articles and tips to get started …

Learning Machine Learning

Fortunately, it is getting easier and easier to get into machine learning. Just today, there was a post on HackerNews about a [cached]JavaScript neural network library. Can't get much easier than this:

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var net = new brain.NeuralNetwork();

net.train([{input: [0, 0], output: [0]},
           {input: [0, 1], output: [1]},
           {input: [1, 0], output: [1]},
           {input: [1, 1], output: [0]}]);

var output = net.run([1, 0]);  // [0.987]

There's more and more [cached]free online courses, and even a [cached]good introduction to Deep Learning.

I've also come across a very neat …

Playing Games with AI

[cached]Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning is certainly the most catchy paper I've read in years. But before I start talking about the paper, you should definitely watch this video from it's presentation:

The basic idea is very simple - to train and evaluate the AI, let it play a variety of computer games. This has several advantages:

• Training and Evaluation can happen faster than real time
• Using several very different games can prevent over-fitting
• Games are usually created to be challenging for humans, thus containing an implicit requirement for intelligence.

DeepMind achieves this by letting it's Deep Reinforcement Learning …

Towards General Artificial Intelligence

I you haven't slept under a rock for the past months you've surely heard of Google's acquisition of DeepMind, an AI company that is still quite young. For general facts about them I'll just refer you to Wikipedia or the usual news articles, but much more interestingly they've actually published quite a few papers about their methodology:

• [cached]Neural Variational Inference and Learning in Belief Networks
• [cached]Stochastic Back-Propagation and Variational Inference in Deep Latent Gaussian Models
• [cached]Deep Autoregressive Networks
• [cached]Unit Tests for Stochastic Optimization
• [cached]Deterministic Policy Gradient Algorithms
• [cached]Unsupervised Feature Learning by Deep Sparse Coding …

Fighting Link Rot

Gwern's post on [cached]link rot got me thinking. Periodically checking links to see if they are broken is nice, but not really an adequate solution - content might already have disappeared by the time I realize. Besides, websites change a lot, in a year a site might look very different from what I linked to originally. This might be acceptable if I'm linking to the site in general, but unacceptable if linking to a very specific post.

Since I had a free Sunday morning anyway, I set out to create a [cached]Pelican Plugin that would automate this process for …

New Backend, New Style

After being fed up with the intricate dance necessary to set up Ruby to get Octopress to run for quite some time, I decided that it was finally time to migrate to a better blogging system. A replacement was quickly found: [cached]Pelican. It's based on Python, quick and easy to install (no annoying version incompatabilities) and has a lot of nice plugins and themes.

Which gave me the excuse to go hunt for a nice clean theme - I had been jealous of all those minimalist blogs. So here it is, new blog, new theme, and - next post in a …

Units of Measure for Real

I'm almost done with my thesis now, as you might have noticed it's about a Units of Measure system in Scala. I will do a more detailed post on it sometime in the future, but I figured I might at least release the pdf of the thesis now. So here it is!

Units of Measure - A Scala Macro System

I finally finished my Units of Measure system for Scala. The source is - of course - on [cached]GitHub, and I'm putting the finishing touches on my thesis about it, but for a quick view please refer to this presentation: