SIPB's Practical Introduction to Deep Learning with Tensorflow

Join us at this meetup to learn to actually use tensorflow (https://www.tensorflow.org/) to make your own Deep Learning models. Anyone with a laptop, an AWS account (https://aws.amazon.com/), and a willingness to spend a couple of dollars to rent an AWS machine, will be able to learn how to start up tensorflow, write a simple model in it, train the model, and get results from it.

What is Deep Learning?

An incredibly versatile (https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-practical-applications-of-deep-learning-What-are-all-the-major-areas-fields) tool for teaching machines to solve problems which seemed out of reach five years ago: the best go player in the world (https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/), self-driving cars (https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/05/06/self-driving-cars-3/), and effective natural-language translation systems (https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html) all use deep-learning components.

What is Tensorflow?

A programming library for building and using Deep Learning models using the python programming language.

What are the Prerequisites for this Tutorial?

• The courage to experiment with new technology.

• An AWS account (sign up here (https://aws.amazon.com/).)

• A credit card and a couple of dollars to rent a computer from AWS.

• A way to connect to AWS machines (download PuTTY here (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html), though any ssh/scp client will do.)

What are we going to be doing, exactly?

Starting up and connecting to an AWS machine which can train tensorflow models, installing tensorflow on it, and using it to work through this tutorial (https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.11/tutorials/mnist/beginners/index.html) on training a neural net to recognize handwritten numbers.

What's it going to cost?

We aren't charging anything. Renting the AWS machine will cost about 65c/hour (http://www.ec2instances.info/?filter=g2%20double). The total cost will probably be less than $2

Will there be food and drink?

Sorry, no. You'll have to be content with developing highly valued skills and knowledge!