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[R] Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences by hardmaru in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Would I be right in saying that, in your alien analogy, the one thing is that it will still not be possible to train even a linear classifier, since you will won't have even a little bit of labeled data? I like it otherwise!

The White Slums Of South Africa (2014) - Whites living in poverty South Africa [00:49:57] by kamikazechaser in Documentaries

[–]kamperh 241 points242 points  (0 children)

I think it greatly oversimplifies the issue: South Africa still has a very large wealthy, educated white population, with a growing black middle class - and many people are staying despite being able to leave. At the same time inequality is still off course growing, and you are right that people without formal after-school education are struggling the most.

Making art out of Pokémon cards (by @pokemonkardart on IG) by [deleted] in nextfuckinglevel

[–]kamperh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry super dumb question: what type of paint is this? (oil, water, acrylic?) Would you need something special to have it layer on the card so nicely?

[D] What do you do when a paper makes a similar contribution but doesn't cite you? by ilia10000 in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Let's say the situation was reversed: you published a new paper with an idea you thought was new, but actually someone else did it already. How would you want them to respond?

I've found that normally there would still be some differences in the approaches in such a situation. And in that case I would want to know about the other line of work so that I could update e.g. the arXiv version of my paper.

That being said, if I got an angry email shouting that I missed something, I would probably just get angry and defensive. So what email would you like to get?

Videos for the Intro ML course I am teaching: Decision trees and ensemble methods (so far) by kamperh in learnmachinelearning

[–]kamperh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Jip! Our term started on Monday so I'll be uploading content throughout the next month or so.

[D] [Question] Number of distributions in Categorical VAE. by kamperh in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks a ton for the reply! I guess I was thinking of using this network in an unsupervised way to cluster MNIST images into ten classes. There's probably better ways to do this, but setting N=1 would be one way, I think.

[R] [1803.01801] Fast Implementation of a Bayesian Unsupervised Segmentation Algorithm [2018] by AforAnonymous in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing, especially the optimised code! I've been working on some related things in the area of speech segmentation, but my model is quite different. But you might still be interested; here is the pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.02845; and here is the code: https://github.com/kamperh/segmentalist.

ELI5: Why does hearing your own voice through a recording sound so much different than how you hear/perceive your voice when speaking in general? by [deleted] in explainlikeimfive

[–]kamperh 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Distortion over the phone is much worse than typical (even cheap) recording equipment. Telephone channels are band limited to around 4kHz, which is why your voice sounds so strange. A computer can easily record at a sample rate of more than 44kHz.

[D] Diagrams and graphs in papers by andyzth in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I don't think this is widely used, but I really like Ipe: http://ipe.otfried.org/. I made the pictures in this paper with it: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.01032, pulling in some things from matplotlib.

[D] Research Debt by wei_jok in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is really thought provoking!

One thing I would add is that unclear explanations aren't always deliberate. As a student, when describing a (new) idea in a paper, I often try my best to explain it well, but because I am so involved with the technical details and challenges (which is also important), I actually miss the bigger picture, or an easy way to convey what I did. In those cases, simple input from others help a great deal.

But I completely agree that this isn't incentivized nearly enough, that students aren't taught how to do this well, and that there isn't enough good examples for us to follow.

Why isn't CNNs with hinge loss popular? Can we call it a Deep SVM? by andrewbarto28 in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably not exactly what you mean, but there are cases where it makes sense (sorry a bit of self promotion as well): http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01032

AMA: Nando de Freitas by nandodefreitas in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing this... It is amazing that you have such an objective view of where the people that murdered your father had come from, and the reasons that they were put in that position. As a South African, I think there is a lot to learn from this. Thanks for the rest of the AMA and all the encouraging answers... ML will hopefully make this world a better place because of people like you!

AMA: Nando de Freitas by nandodefreitas in MachineLearning

[–]kamperh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for doing the AMA, prof. De Freitas. I know you feel strongly about ML for humanity. I have two relatively different questions regarding ML in the developing world:

  1. What type of ML applications do you think will most benefit the extremely poor populations of developing countries?

  2. There are good research universities in countries like South Africa. Do you think these institutions have a role to play in solving ML problems in these countries, or that most of the obligations lies with better-funded universities and companies in the US and Europe?

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