Written by Matthew Russell who follows Jesus, studies machine learning at the University of Kentucky, and interns at NASA. Get to know him or check out his projects on GitHub.
So How Exactly Can I Meet My Goodreads Goal?
A review of my book reading conundrum. We meet Mr. Metropolis and Mr. Hastings. Maybe my reading speed is fine after all.
Connecting the Dots of Monte Carlo
February 20, 2021Monte Carlo ad nauseum. Predicting diseases from known genes. Estimating genes from observed diseases. Blatant abuse of function notation.
Monte Carlo Simulations
February 19, 2021An intractable coffee problem. Your model is garbage, but very precisely so. The Tampa Bay Rays don't understand autoregressive processes. My reading goal is a bit lofty.
Making Sense of the Embedded Landscape
December 25, 2020#iot#arduinoThe world of embedded hardware and firmware is confusing. If you’re already confused, “firmware” just means “software that runs very close to the hardware.” And “very close to the hardware” means that you have no operating system to work with. The code you run is the only code there is. Nothing’s magic, and that’s important to remember, probably in general. I’d guess the culprit is the variation among manufacturers which becomes accentuated with embedded platforms since you are working so close…
Reviewing the reMarkable 2
December 20, 2020#reviewBack in April I pre-ordered the new reMarkable 2 e-paper tablet. Shipping took several months, but I finally received my tablet back in November. In the days leading up to receiving my unit, I heard mixed, but overall positive reviews for the new device. After working with the device for the last month, I wanted to add my thoughts to the mix. The basics are there: palm rejection is phenomenal since the pen uses different technology than the touchscreen, writing is fluid with no noticeable delay…
Estimating Baseball Event Probabilities With log5
December 03, 2020#baseball#probability#mathIn his 1981 and 1983 Baseball Abstracts, pioneering sabermetrician Bill James proposed the log5 method for mixing event probabilities, which is similar to metrics used in other fields. Here are two motivating scenarios: Team A has winning percentage . Team B has winning percentage . What is the expected winning percentage of Team A against Team B? A pitcher strikes out 20% of batters he faces. A batter strikes out 10% of the time. What is the expected strikeout rate in this matchup? Winning…
Disentangling VAEs, KL Divergence, and Mutual Information
September 24, 2020#probability#math#machine-learning#jointvaeI’ve recently been reading about the JointVAE model proposed by Emilien Dupont in the paper Learning Disentangled Joint Continuous and Discrete Representations. The paper builds on the development of variational autoencoders (VAEs). As a quick overview, autoencoders are neural networks that take an input, generate some “secret” representation of it, then try to use that “secret” code to reconstruct the input. If it can do that well, then we have found a secret code that summarizes the important…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling
September 23, 2020#probability#mathOne of my courses recently introduced Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, which has a lot of applications. I’d like to dive into those applications in a future post, but for now let’s take a quick look at Metropolis-Hastings MCMC. A Brief Prologue Let’s say we have a probability distribution function (within a mulplicative constant) that is very complex. We have an equation, but maybe it is impossible to integrate. Somehow, we’d like to draw samples from this distribution to estimate…
Belief Propagation
September 16, 2020#probability#mathLet’s say that you and I are roommates, and I notice you’ve been gone the last two Friday nights. This is not necessarily unusual, and sometimes your Friday night excursion is a date. However, you don’t communicate well, so I have no idea if you had a date or not. As you prepare to go out for the third Friday in a row, I wonder if this Friday you have a date. You won’t spill the beans, but I have a mind-reading superpower — *pause for dramatic effect* — math 🔥. I make an educated guess that if…
It's Not Magic, Just Close
June 27, 2020#machine-learningHow AI recognizes things it has only seen a handful of times, once, or not at all
Using Numpy with Intel MKL on macOS
April 23, 2020#python#numpy#blasNumpy defaults to OpenBLAS, but conda has automatic MKL support. How can we tell Numpy to skip OpenBLAS and use MKL?
Setting Up Single-Node Hadoop on an Ubuntu VM (Windows 10 Host)
February 17, 2020#hadoop#ubuntuYou could use the Cloudera Quickstart VM, but then you wouldn't be able to use Kotlin.
How to Win a Science & Engineering Fair
January 07, 2020#science fairAs competition season comes upon us, several suggestions come to mind for students eager to learn the methods and madness of science fair competitions.
Apparently You Can Hard Brick SD Cards
December 29, 2019#raspberry-piRecently, I was attempting to setup a Raspberry Pi Zero W with the latest Raspbian Buster Lite image and ran into an ... uh ... issue.
ALBERT - Alexa-controlled LEGO Biological ExpeRimenT
December 24, 2019#ev3#space#challenge(UPDATE: I didn't win.) Hackster recently (read: September) announced a LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 and Alexa challenge.
Initial Commit
December 12, 2019#markdownI've considered starting a blog more than once over the past few years. Also, markdown is the best.