Googlielmo's blog

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems are aimed to find similar images to an input image by querying an image data set. I am pretty sure you've used a CBIR several times before: here's the most popular one: The search in CBIRs isn't text-based as images are indexed by their visual content. Features are extracted from an image database and stored in some file system or object storage.Then, any time a new image is passed as search criterion, all those images which features are closest to the input image features are returned as results. The traditional feature extraction process relies on algorithms such as SURF or SIFT , but in this series I am going to describe my journey into CBIR using an unsupervised Deep Learning approach. Here's a preview of the first attempt, in order to search for food images (the input image in this case is an apple pie): In the next posts of this series I will walk through the details of the implementation before making thi...

During these strange days of emergency we could observe, among many others from the academy and the industry, lots of initiatives by individuals or groups of Data Scientists using public available data sets to make predictions about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic or other healthcare related applications to help in diagnosing the symptoms of the virus whether test kits for it wouldn't be available. Every little helps, it is also wonderful to see this high level of genuine interest on this matter and I am one of those that encourage people being curious and altruistic. But, as others have already started warning lately, any personal initiative, to be effective, needs to be evaluated by subject matter experts. In this post I am going to provide a concrete example about the importance of this kind of collaboration. At the end of 2019, I got a very bad flu which then ended up in an acute bronchitis, from which I recovered very slowly. During the rest of my life, after my ch...

I am so excited to be attending the Shift AI conference this April in Dublin! It's @shiftconf_co 's #ArtificialIntelligence conference where we will discuss the newest technologies in data mining, machine learning and neural networks. While Ireland is a very active hub for AI in Europe, so far there has been a lack of good conferences happening here: so, Shift AI is welcome! I hope to see you at the event. Learn more over at https://ctt.ec/2K2o6+

I hope you are going to attend the 8th edition of Big Things 2019 , the data and AI conference which will happen in Madrid (Spain) on November 20th and 21st. This conference started in 2012 and this year changed its name from Big Data Spain to Big Things, as it became focused not only on Big Data, but also on whatever is related to AI. Among the speakers this year there will be big names such as Cassie Kozyrkov, Alberto Cairo, Jesse Anderson, Michael Armbrust, Suneel Marthi, Paco Nathan and many others. My talk will be on Thursday 21st at 1:55 PM local time. I am going to give an update on importing and re-training Keras / TensorFlow models in DL4J and Apache Spark . It is a follow-up of some of the topics covered in my book , considering changes related to new releases of DL4J, Keras and TensorFlow since it has been published in January this year. Please stop by if you are going to attend my talk and the conference. I really appreciated the conversations about Deep Learning ...

Colab is the Google's platform for working with Python notebooks and practice Deep Learning using different frameworks. It is a powerful platform, there is availability of GPUs or TPUs, it allows to use your Google Drive space for notebooks and data, has a friendly user interface and lots of useful features, but in order to install/update Python packages, it comes by default only with pip and no availability for conda . If you need to import a Python package which is available in Anaconda , but not in PyPi you need to install Anaconda or Miniconda yourself from a notebook. In this post I am explaining the simple steps to do it. Anaconda installation Create your notebook and from a code cell download the Anaconda installer: !wget -c https://repo.continuum.io/archive/Anaconda3-5.1.0-Linux-x86_64.sh This is the version that works fine for me. I have tried also with the latest release 2019.10, but the configuration then would have extra complexity. Now you need to make the do...

During last Spark+AI Summit Europe 2019 I had a chance to attend a talk from Miguel Martinez  who was presenting Rapids , the new Open Source framework from NVIDIA for GPU accelerated end-to-end Data Science and Analytics. Fig. 1 - Overview of the Rapids eco-system Rapids is a suite of Open Source libraries: cuDF cuML cuGraph cuXFilter I enjoied the presentation and liked the idea of this initiative, so I wanted to start playing with the Rapids libraries in Python on Colab , starting from cuDF, but the first attempt came with an issue that I eventually solved. So in this post I am going to share how I fixed it, with the hope it would be useful to someone else running into the same blocker. I am assuming here you are already familiar with Google Colab. I am using Python 3.x as Python 2 isn't supported by Rapids. Once you have created a new notebook in Colab, you need to check if the runtime for it is set to use Python 3 and uses a GPU as hardware accelerator. You...

Following my recent talk at day 2 of the Big Data Days in Moscow, it seems that the training on Apache Spark of Deep Learning models is a hot topic. If you are in Dublin on Wednesday November 6th and want to hear more about it, please join the next Data Science Ireland Meetup , which would be hosted by Mason, Hayes & Curran . The event will start at 6 PM, it will be moderated by Mark Kelly from Alldus and there will be talks from Brian McElligott, Partner at Mason Hayes & Curran and me. You can find all of the details in the official Meetup page. At the moment this post is written the full capacity (120 places) has been reached and there is one person in the waiting list, but if you're interested in I suggest you to join any way the waiting list and monitor it, as some people could cancel also last minute. I hope to meet you there.