consulting - rolisz's blog

rolisz's blog

consulting

A collection of 25 posts

Half a year as an indie consultant

Half a year as an indie consultant

It's hard to believe it's been more than half an year since I started my own company and became an independent machine learning consultant. It's been a very interesting ride. There have been plenty of moments where the predominant feeling was "what now?". How am I going to find more

Design patterns in real life

Design patterns in real life

In programming there are so called design patterns, which are basically commonly repeated pieces of code that occur often enough that people thought it would be helpful to give them a name so that’s it’s easier to talk about them. One example is the iterator pattern, which is

How to ML - Monitoring

machine learning

How to ML - Monitoring

As much as machine learning developers like to think that once they've got a good enough model, the job is done, it's not quite so. The first couple of weeks after deployment are critical. Is the model really as good as offline tests said they are? Maybe something is different

machine learning

GPT-3 and AGI

One of the most impressive/controversial papers from 2020 was GPT-3 from OpenAI. It's nothing particularly new, it's mostly a bigger version of GPT-2, which came out in 2019. It's a much bigger version, being by far the largest machine learning model at the time it was release, with 175

How to ML - Deploying

machine learning

How to ML - Deploying

So the ML engineer presented the model to the business stakeholders and they agreed that it performed well enough on the key metrics in testing that it's time to deploy it to production. So now we have to make sure the models run reliably in production. We have to answer

How to ML - Models

machine learning

How to ML - Models

So we finally got our data and we can get to machine learning. Without the data, there is no machine learning, there is at best human learning, where somebody tries to write an algorithm by hand to do the task at hand. This is the part that most people who

How to ML - Data

machine learning

How to ML - Data

So we've decided what metrics we want to track for our machine learning project. Because ML needs data, we need to get it. In some cases we get lucky and we already have it. Maybe we want to predict the failure of pieces of equipment in a factory. There are

How to ML - Metrics

machine learning

How to ML - Metrics

We saw that machine learning algorithms process large amounts of data to find patterns. But how exactly do they do that? The first step in a machine learning project is establishing metrics. What exactly do we want to do and how do we know we're doing it well? Are we

What is ML? part 3

machine learning

What is ML? part 3

Yesterday we saw that machine learning is behind some successful products and it does have the potential to bring many more changes to our life. So what is it? Well, the textbook definition is that it's the building of algorithms that can perform tasks they were not explicitly programmed to

What is ML? part 2

machine learning

What is ML? part 2

Yesterday [https://rolisz.ro/2020/12/21/what-is-ml/] I wrote how AI made big promises in the past but it failed to deliver, but that now it's different. What's changed? Well, now we have several products that work well with machine learning. My favorite example is Google Photos [https://photos.

machine learning

What is ML?

Machine learning is everywhere these days. Mostly in newspapers, but it's seeping into many real life, actual use cases. But what is it actually? If you read only articles on TechCrunch [https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/03/ais-next-act-genius-chips-programmable-silicon-and-the-future-of-computing/] , Forbes [https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/07/09/elon-musk-tesla-will-have-level-5-self-driving-cars-this-year/] , Business

Machine Learning stories: Misunderstood suggestions

machine learning

Machine Learning stories: Misunderstood suggestions

A couple of years ago I was working on a calendar application, on the machine learning team, to make it smarter. We had many great ideas, one of them being that once you indicated you wanted to meet with a group of people, the app would automatically suggest you a

My next steps

In November I quit my job as the tech lead of the machine learning team at Archive360. Starting December 1st I am looking to provide my services as a machine learning consultant.

Playing Codenames in Rust with word vectors

Playing Codenames in Rust with word vectors

In a previous post [https://rolisz.ro/2020/06/10/playing-codenames-with-rust/] I implemented the game of Codenames in Rust, allowing a human player to interact with the computer playing randomly. Now let's implement a smarter computer agent, using word vectors. Word vectors (or word embeddings) are a way of converting

Giving code presentations

Giving code presentations

I sometimes give talks at the local tech hub [https://oradeatechhub.ro/] in the city where I live. It's not a big community, but I enjoy giving talks and they often provide a necessary deadline and motivation to finish some projects. Last week I gave a talk about Rust. Given

Playing Codenames with Rust

Playing Codenames with Rust

I love playing board games. I love machine learning. I love Rust. So why not combine them and do something really fun? So I ran a word vector analogy query and I got back: machine learning + board games - Rust = Codenames So let's implement Codenames in Rust. It's a simple

Web crawler in Rust

Web crawler in Rust

I have heard many good things about Rust for several years now. A couple of months ago, I finally decided to start learning Rust. I skimmed through the Book [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/title-page.html] and did the exercises from rustlings [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings]. While they helped

Monitoring GPU usage with StackDriver

Monitoring GPU usage with StackDriver

At work we use Google Cloud Platform to run our machine learning jobs on multiple machines. GCP has a monitoring platform called Stackdriver which can be used to view all kinds of metrics about your VMs. Unfortunately, it doesn't collect any metrics about GPUs,

Regular Expressions for Objects

Regular Expressions for Objects

For work I recently needed to do something that is very similar to regexes, but with a twist: it should operate on lists of objects, not only on strings. Luckily, Python came to the rescue with REfO [https://pypi.org/project/REfO/], a library for doing just this. My usecase

Real estate cohort analysis

Real estate cohort analysis

After in the last post we looked how to get the data, now we are going to start analyzing it. The first question we are interested in is how quickly do houses sell. We don't have access to actual contracts, so we will use a proxy to measure this: how

Scraping for houses

Scraping for houses

Having moved back to Romania, I decided I would need a place to live in, ideally to buy. So we started looking online for various places, we went to see a lot of them. Lots of work, especially footwork. But, being the data nerd that I am, I wanted to

Indexing IM logs with Elasticsearch

Indexing IM logs with Elasticsearch

Remember my old project [https://github.com/rolisz/Log] for processing instant messaging logs? Probably, because I wrote about it five years ago [https://rolisz.ro/2012/08/20/processing-im-logs/]. Well, the project is only mostly dead, every once in a while I still occasionally

What I think of the AI hype

What I think of the AI hype

During the last year there have been many [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html] articles [http://ujkurir.blog.hu/2015/02/19/ai_brutalis_lesz_az_evszazad_kozepe] about the upcoming singularity and what will happen after that. Elon Musk [http://mashable.com/2014/11/

machine learning

Character segmentation overfitting

I'm doing a project about doing OCR on receipts and today, while trying to do character segmentation, I made a pretty stupid mistake that led to my model overfitting almost perfectly pretty neatly (in some cases I got 100% correct classification

Neural Networks in Python

machine learning

Neural Networks in Python

Artificial Neural Networks are a mathematical model, inspired by the brain, that is often used in machine learning. It was initially proposed in the '40s and there was some interest initially, but it waned soon due to the inefficient training algorithms used and