Cover image by xkcd Over the last months I’ve been working my way through Project Euler in my spare time. I wanted to learn Python programming, and what better way than solving mini-problems and -projects?! Well, Project Euler got a ton of these, listed in increasing order of difficulty. It starts out simple: to solve…
Tag: opensource
Google Fonts: 915 free font families
Looking for a custom typeface to use in your data visualizations? Google Fonts is an awesome databank of nearly a thousands font families you can access, download, and use for free. If you’re into design, the website includes a blog featuring articles on font design. Google Fonts among others provided the font for my dissertation…
Circular Map Cutouts in R
Katie Jolly wanted to surprise a friend with a nice geeky gift: a custom-made map cutout. Using R and some visual finetuning in Inkscape, she was able to made the below. A detailed write-up of how Katie got to this product is posted here. Basically, the R’s tigris package included all data on roads, and…
Papers with Code: State-of-the-Art
OK, this is a really great find! The website PapersWithCode.com lists all scientific publications of which the codes are open-sourced on GitHub. Moreover, you can sort these papers by the stars they accumulated on Github over the past days. The authors, @rbstojnic and @rosstaylor90, just made this in their spare time. Thank you, sirs! Papers with Code allows you to quickly…
Open Source Visual Inspector for Neuroevolution (VINE)
In optimizing their transportation services, Uber uses evolutionary strategies and genetic algorithms to train deep neural networks through reinforcement learning. A lot of difficult words in one sentence; you can imagine the complexity of the process. Because it is particularly difficult to observe the underlying dynamics of this learning process in neural network optimization, Uber…
Super Resolution: A Photo Enhancer AI
In the video below, one of my favorite YouTube channels (Two Minute Papers) discusses a new super resolution project where academic scholars taught a neural network to improve low quality photo’s. The researchers took the same picture with multiple camera’s of varying quality and allowed a neural network to learn how the lowest quality pictures can be adjusted to…
Bayesian data analysis for newcomers
Professor John Kruschke and Torrin Liddell – one of his Ph.D. students at Indiana University – wrote a fantastically useful scientific paper introducing Bayesian data analysis to the masses. Kruschke and Liddell explain the main ideas behind Bayesian statistics, how Bayesians deal with continuous and binary variables, how to use and set meaningful priors, the differences between…
Kaggle Data Science Survey 2017: Worldwide Preferences for Python & R
Kaggle conducts industry-wide surveys to assess the state of data science and machine learning. Over 17,000 individuals worldwide participated in the survey, myself included, and 171 countries and territories are represented in the data. There is an ongoing debate regarding whether R or Python is better suited for Data Science (probably the latter, but I nevertheless prefer…
Predict the Sentimental Response to your Facebook Posts
Max Woolf writes machine learning blogs on his personal blog, minimaxir, and posts open-source code repositories on his GitHub. He is a former Apple Software QA Engineer and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. I have published his work before, for instance, this short ggplot2 tutorial by MiniMaxir, but his new project really amazed me. Max developed a Facebook web scaper in…
