This is the week where it got real for me. We started off the week with a meeting with Allen where we went over our end of summer presentations covering our experience in the program.
Our second day we had a presentation by Daniels friend, Arun. He apparently works for Deepmind and told us all about his work with deep neural networks and how they use them to play video games at a high level. The most fascinating part, at least for me, was his story on how the network learned to play GO and beat professional player Lee Sedol. It also contributed to Lee’s decision to retire.
That day was jam packed with knowledge because a few hours later we heard from Yongyi Zhae a graduate student who is working on deciphering images from the brain using machine learning. The idea being you show a human an image, map what parts of their brain activates, and use that to train the network. EVERYTHING about this blew my mind and even now it seems like something out of a sci-fi movie. So in the simplest terms that make sense to me is you shoot light into the brain and try to decipher whatever light gets refracted. Obviously the signal is going to be a mess because of the skull and other biological matter, so then they use machine learning to clean the signal up. Long after this program is over I’m going to try to keep a lookout of this research. The applications are incredible!
Finally on to our homework. I had taken a pause on the coursera course cause I felt like I needed soem more background knowledge before moving forward. The resources Mary provided are incredible. The Kaggle course did an amazing job at showing you the material, explaining to you why things were done as show, then tested you on it. After that I did the Tensorflow assignment and it really reinforced the material. I feel like I understand it more! The week is technically “over” but I’m going to spend the week trying to complete a kaggle competition and doing the snapchat filter project. I want to absorb as much knowledge as possible from this experience.
