Startup Data Science

Alex gives a quick recap of Lesson 5, using embeddings with imdb review data to categorize movies into clusters using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Edderic, Apurva, and Alex discuss what they're excited about with using NLP and also speak to their motivation as they continue to learn deep learning.

Alex is excited about collaborative filtering and he could see using it in his startup to help people unlearn toxic behaviors and beliefs in a productive way. Apurva started working remotely; she found it hard to stay motivated to study. She has issues with collaborative filtering in Netflix; she feels like Netflix's recommendation algorithm is not good for discovering new things because she thinks the recommendations tend to be similar to the past. Edderic's been busy with work at Lingo Live. Edderic enjoys the part of the video lesson where Jeremy destroys the movie data set recommender benchmark seamlessly with a Neural Network.

Apurva loved Jeremy's presentation using Excel to show how calculations are being made; it was a great confidence-building exercise for her to replicate it in Excel. Edderic's excited about Jeremy's claim that Convolutional Neural Networks are doing well in Speech Recognition. There are tons of machine learning algorithms out there; he thinks it would be nice to have just one super algorithm/architecture to rule them all. Alex explains his idea of convolution through an analogy.

Alex thinks dropout is cool. He's still not quite sure what batch normalization is. Regarding ImageNet competition, Apurva, along with offering tips to staying motivated to learning says that instead of creating "new" models, people are only doing ensembling now to get a marginal edge over everyone else. Edderic announces revamping his PC workstation for deep learning (bye-bye Amazon!)

Alex promises to do 20 min. of Data Science every day to keep making progress. Edderic learns that Apurva hasn't submitted the Cats and Dogs Kaggle submission yet, so he feels a little bit better about himself for not submitting yet either. Alex mistakes Natural Language Processing for Neuro-Linguistic Programming (whoops!)