Deep Learning RTP Meetup - Getting Started With Deep Learning

Below are my notes from last night’s meet up with Deep Learning RTP. The presentation was an overview of Fast.ai - Practical Deep Learning for Coders MOOC. I remember the organizer pitching the course last year at a Pydata meetup. The group seemed to learn a lot in a good way in a short amount of time.

The course notes that you will probably spend 10 hours a week for 7 weeks which includes a total of 20 hours of video. I am concerned that I don’t have time to keep up with the group, but if I focus other goals (write, Python daily, learn something every week) around the course it might work out in the long run.

Last night’s presenter, Danny Siegel, had a good outlook “Try it and see if you like it.” Which is what I think I will do.

Fast.ai in 5 minutes

  • About a year old
  • People with stats and math backgrounds go faster

Fast.ai - Practical Deep Learning for Coders

  • Videos, Notes, Forums

What is Deep Learning?

  • Applications

    • Pictures
    • Art
    • Words
    • Music
    • Pharma
    • Self Driving Cars
    • Anything with Numbers

  • Building Blocks

    • Convolutions
    • Fully Connected Layers
    • Activation Functions
    • Stochastic Gradient Descent

Practical

  • GPU (AWS), Cresle, Paperspace
  • Kaggle data
  • PyTorch
    • Theano
    • TensorFlow

Coding Tools

  • Python
  • Jupyter
  • Tmux
  • Scripts

Slack Channel
deeplearningrtp.slack.com/

Study Groups
Group is collaborative, community focused.

  • Come as you are
  • New People every week
  • Everyone is student and teacher
  • Supportive Environment

Neural Networks

  • infinitely flexible Functions
  • Functions that map inputs to outputs
  • Biggest promise is for unsolved problems

Services with GPUs

  • Crestle.com
    • 1 hour free
    • Start Jupyter
    • Use the terminal to clone the fast.ai GitHub repo
    • Course directory is ready to go
  • Paperspace.com
    • Choose Linux
    • Couple hours to get approved, tell them doing the fast.ai Course

General

  • Linear algebra focused
  • distill pub for more basic fundamentals
  • github.com/deeplearningrtp
  • openai
  • magenta TensorFlow sketch
Written on January 30, 2018