Monthly Archives: November 2013
Interesting data science applications
In recent years, machine learning (or data science) has really been taking off, moving beyond academia, and being applied in lots of different fields. Here are a few real-world interesting applications I’ve come across: From Amnesty International, a preliminary project … Continue reading
Machine learning with Python
With the scikit-learn toolkit, simple machine learning in Python is really easy. This example is for binary classification, where the training data is stored in a single CSV file. The first entry in each line is the class, and the remaining … Continue reading
Voice interfaces in cars
With the advent of Siri and Google Now, conversational voice interfaces are being pushed into the mainstream as a natural way to interact with machines. A huge advantage of using speech technology to interact with computers is that you don’t need … Continue reading
Interview with a baby
I recently found out that two companies (let’s call them A and B) are both planning to open research labs in the UK working on the sort of stuff I specialise in. This wasn’t great timing for me as at the time … Continue reading
Crawling the web with Python
You can use two libraries to examine webpages in Python. The first, requests, is built into the language, and is apparently better than the other built in library urllib. The second, BeautifulSoup, for parsing the HTML can be installed with pip … Continue reading
What is my job?
“What do you do?” It’s a question often asked, but one that I sometimes find hard to answer, especially when everyone else has preconceived ideas about what different jobs involve and the kinds of people who do them. I’m not … Continue reading
My Computer Doesn't Listen 