April's SheffieldML brings us up to speed with hot topics in machine learning today.
Andy Mayer (Twitter @andymayer) will be presenting a lightning talk on Conversational Interfaces with IBM Watson.
Then Mat Hall (Twitter @mathew_hall) will be running a workshop using Keras, the Python Deep Learning library. He says:
In this workshop, we'll get to grips with using Keras for image recognition. We'll go over how neural networks can learn how to extract features from inputs without needing careful feature engineering. The workshop will be centred around a practical exercise to quickly get prediction results by re-using a network trained by someone else (in our case VGG16), we'll then see how we can re-purpose a pre-trained network for a different classification task by slicing the network. Finally, if there's time, we'll see how we can abuse the network to optimise an image instead of classify it (making our own Deep Dream images).
The workshop will be run on a Jupyter notebook, available at the repository here: https://github.com/mathew-hall/ShefMLKeras . To participate, you'll need to set up an environment (there's a script in the resources to run) or use the cloud notebook provided.
Problem of the Month
https://www.kaggle.com/c/digit-recognizer , a challenge to recognise handwritten digits. Have a go, share your successes and problems in a meetup discussion or our slack channel.
What to bring?
Wifi is available at the venue. You'll need a laptop to try out the hands-on session and we recommending downloading any resources you're going to need beforehand. We'll make sure an HDMI-ready projector or big TV is available for speakers.
Refreshments?
The Showroom Cafe Bar can provide water for free, or the usual kind of food and drink if you want to pay for it.
Code of Conduct?
We follow the code of conduct described at http://berlincodeofconduct.org/
Call for Speakers
Have you done anything involving machine learning or a related field lately? Whether you're a beginner or an expert, we'd love to hear about it. Anything from a ten-minute lightning talk to a two hour workshop, it's up to you - slides optional! Speak to Elliot or Paul at the meetup, in the Slack channel, on meetup or DM @shef_ml on Twitter to find out more.
Freebies?
We're an O'Reilly Partner, and as a member you can get a free 30 day trial with Safari Books Online at https://www.safaribooksonline.com/getsafari/?code=PCSMLM. They also give us a 20% discount for the Strata Conference https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-eu with code PCSMLM20.
