Intro to Deep Learning (in Clojure and Python) w/ @JRHeard and @JulioBarros

Deep learning (DL) has become an important topic in the AI and machine learning world. New advances in algorithms, hardware and software have made it a critical part of self driving cars, language translation, image understanding, medical analysis, and many other fields. Though DL systems are commonly written in Python (wrapping C/C++ libraries) we want to explore options available to Clojure developers.

We'll have a 2 part meeting with myself (Julio) and JR leading extended lightning-talk style presentations.

First, Julio will guide us through a discussion on:

• the basics of deep learning and the common tools and libraries

Java and Clojure options (DeepLearning4J and Cortex) and when they may be applicable.

In the second part JR will discuss his experiences while taking a deep learning for self driving cars course.

JR Says: Neural networks are just plain spooky. In just the past few years, they've gotten so good at classifying images (is this a cat or a dog? is this tissue cancerous or non-cancerous?) that they're often better at their task than humans are. In this talk, you'll see how to use a neural network - the same one used by comma.ai, a real-life self-driving car company - to drive a simulated car better than JR can.

Bios:

JR Heard likes writing computer programs and talking about writing computer programs. He thinks that pure functions and immutable data are just the absolute greatest things in the world. He lives in Portland with a cat named Frank.

Julio is a consultant in Portland Oregon and is fascinated by Clojure and all things data.