I have used the Python data manipulation package Pandas daily and professionally for the last six years, but I’ve never actually done any official training or read books on using Pandas. My Pandas fluency has come slowly by solving daily problems and overcoming obstacles through looking at the Pandas documentation and reading helpful posts on…
AI practitioner turns Science Fiction into reality
Most people have dreamt about what the future looks like, but that future is already here for Hesham Dar – a Data Scientist and AI practitioner in Samsung Research. We talked with Hesham about how science fiction coloured his view on AI and how he wanted to be a part of developing the technology he saw on television shows such as Star Trek.
How Science Fiction inspires scientists
Thinking up new ideas and theories before technology can support them requires imagination, vision, and an open mind. This article explores how visionary science fiction writers lays the groundwork for technological inventions long before the required technology exists. The science fiction genre has been called the “literature of ideas”. While humans have always speculated about futuristic…
Reflections after reading A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
Jeff Hawkins newest book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence discusses how the brain uses map-like structures to model the world and what this might mean for our next leap in achieving true artificial intelligence. Continue reading to discover my reflections from reading the book. The book in three sentences The author presents…
Comparison between PCA and LDA
PCA and LDA are two popular dimensionality reduction methods commonly used on data with too many input features. In many ways the two algorithms are similar, but at the same time very dissimilar. This article highlights some of the similarities and dissimilarities between these two popular algorithms. Let’s remind ourself about how these two algorithms…
Quantifying Londoners change in fitness habits during lockdown
With people being urged to stay at home during the Covid-19 outbreak, gyms closed, and social distancing measures in place, it’s safe to say that fitness and workout trends have changed along with other aspects of daily life. Using data from Twitter, we set out to investigate the popularity of certain fitness related keywords, before…
Tutorial: Making sense of Fitbits’s JSON export
Fitbit has improved its online data exporting tool to allow export of all the accumulated data, a big step up from their previous export tool that was limited to averages over a limited period of time.With devices that are meant to be worn 24/7 to track everything from sleep, steps and heart rate, the amount…
Tutorial: Stress detection with wearable devices and Machine Learning
This blog post presents an automated machine learning approach in Python to create a stress monitoring system with data from devices such as fitness trackers. With the rising popularity of trackers that monitor biological signals 24/7, there is only a matter of time before the technology matures and everyone will be wearing their own ‘doctor…
Recommended Quantum Computing Books
Here are some links to quantum computing related books I’ve found very useful. Note that these are affiliate links, and I get a few pence for server costs and maybe some coffee if you buy through my link. 1. Quantum Computing since Democritus This is an introduction that’s written in an easy to read and…
Tutorial: Quantum Teleportation in Python
Quantum teleportation sounds like science fiction but is a fully working communication protocol to teleport a quantum state from one place to another. This tutorial walks through the steps to program a simple quantum computer to teleport a text message using quantum teleportation. This is part two of the tutorial series on quantum computing in…