Go see Proxistant Vision at SFMCD

When I think of a museum with “craft” in its name, I usually imagine an institution focused on the past. San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design is different. Their mission is to “bring you the work of the hand, mind and heart“, and Bull.Miletic’s Proxistant Vision exhibition is a wonderful example of how their open definition of craft helps them...

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Online Gesture Sensor Demo using WASM

If you’ve heard me on any podcasts recently, you might remember I’ve been talking about a Gesture Sensor as the follow up to our first Person Sensor module. One frustrating aspect of building hardware solutions is that it’s very tough to share prototypes with people, since you usually have to physically send them a device. To work around that problem,...

Dec 2022

Short Links

Years ago I used to write regular “Five Short Links” posts but I gave up as my Twitter account became a better place to share updates, notes, and things I found interesting from around the internet. Now that Twitter is Nazi-positive I’m giving up on it as a platform, so I’m going to try going back to occasional summary posts here instead. Person...

Dec 2022

Why is it so difficult to retrain neural networks and get the same results?

Photo by Ian Sane Last week I had a question from a colleague about reproducibility in TensorFlow, specifically in the 1.14 era. He wanted to be able to run the same training code multiple times and get exactly the same results, which on the surface doesn’t seem like an unreasonable expectation. Machine learning training is fundamentally a series...

Nov 2022

Machines of Loving Understanding

Sparko, the world’s first electrical dog, as he looked on arrival at the engineer’s club, New York City, on his way to the World’s fair, where he will be an attraction at the Westinghouse Building. He walks, barks, wags his tail and sits up to beg. With Sparko, is Elektro, Westinghouse mechanical man. Both are creations of J.M. Barnett, Westinghouse...

Nov 2022

Launching Useful Sensors!

Person Sensor from Useful Sensors For years I’ve wanted to be able to look at a light switch, say “On”, and have the lights switch on. This kind of interface sounds simple, so why doesn’t it exist? It turns out building one requires solving a lot of tough research and engineering challenges, and even more daunting, coming up with a whole new...

Oct 2022

Try OpenAI’s Amazing Whisper Speech Recognition in a Free Web App

Open in Colab You may have noticed that I’m obsessed with open source speech recognition, so I was very excited when OpenAI released a new voice model. I’m even more excited now I’ve had a chance to play with it, the accuracy is extremely impressive, especially as it’s multi-language. OpenAI have done a great job packaging it, you can install...

Sep 2022

How to build Raspberry Pi Pico programs with no software installation

youtube.com/watch?v=bDDgihwDhRE I love using the Raspberry Pi Pico board to teach students about microcontrollers, especially as it only costs $4 and is currently in stock despite the supply chain crisis. I have run into some problems though, because building a program requires installing software. This might not sound like a big barrier, but...

Sep 2022

Why isn’t there more training on the edge?

One of the most frequent questions I get asked from people exploring machine learning beyond cloud and desktop machines is “What about training?”. If you look around at the popular frameworks and use cases of edge ML, most of them seem focused on inference. It isn’t obvious why this is the case though, so I decided to collect my notes in a post here,...

Sep 2022

Don’t worry if college isn’t the happiest time of your life

I was digging through paperwork today to help complete my PhD admission process, and I stopped short when I saw the academic transcript from my undergraduate years. I was a terrible student! I got 0% on one course, awful scores on many others, and had to do a lot of retakes. It brought back memories of how I was feeling when I was 18. I was a mess....

Jun 2022