Fest in October

[Ramprasad Joshi]

Nishith is offering a hands-on workshop-cum-seminar on NLP and Machine Learning using GNU/Linux. Tentatively, the coming October 7 weekend is what we are looking at. We can plan a mega GNU/Linux festival around it.

Let the ideas start flowing, and mark your calendars if that weekend looks fine.

[Jay Rambhia]

I could help with Computer Vision using OpenCV, SimpleCV and Python if anyone's interested.

Regards,
--
Jay Rambhia,
http://jayrambhia.com/
Contact : +91-9967119686

[Dhananjay Sathe]

Umm one issue I think it might clash with Zephyr 2012. In which case it will be a #fail. Ill confirm those dates and get back soon .

Rest looks good, ready to help in any way i can :) 

Cheers !

[Ramprasad Joshi]

So? Any updates? We were thinking of this weekend ... We need to book place and people. Nishith must plan his travel in advance if he is to land here and begin firing in the morning.

---

From: Jay Rambhia <jayram...@gmail.com>
To: lug-b...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Saturday, September 1, 2012 12:10 PM
Subject: Re: [lug-bitsgoa] Fest in October

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[Nishith Rastogi]

Let us push it by a weekend or two, as I doubt if I can plan the travel and presentation now.

Someone from campus, can first confirm the timings with respect to t1/t2/zephyr/waves etc. 

@Sathe, maybe you would want to pick this up. 

Then I can post here the areas that we can cover. And maybe emaad and other people, can also join in, to create a kickass 4+4 (or 2+6) hour session, on hand-on application and learning of ML using Open-Source tools. 

If people are interested, we can cover, even doing baby steps with Hadoop, and how to set it up and use, and more importantly where.  

Regards
Nishith Rastogi

+91-9663384111
--------------------------------------------
Linux: My 42

[Emaad Ahmed Manzoor]

Sounds awesome. Another good thing to know will be the average level
of proficiency of attendees if possible (eg. have they all taken
relevant Coursera courses).

For talk/tutorial proposals we could use the tried-and-tested HasGeek
Funnel: https://github.com/hasgeek/funnel (I can take up the task of
getting up and hosted for us tonight).

This can be populated with proposals and voted on while we settle on
good dates, I'm sure there will be more students and faculty wanting
to share their NLP/CV/ML work and insights they've gained. Maybe even
some talks on how NLP/CV/ML *might* help solve problems in
non-computer-science domains (staff from the biology department comes
to mind). That could open us up to thinking about different problems
and solving them eventually.

I'd personally love to see a CV session from Jay if it included some
theoretical fundamentals apart from slapping together library calls,
particularly on text-line detection and text-extraction from images.

Emaad Ahmed Manzoor

[Dhananjay Sathe]

Hello,

 Sorry was away for a couple of days, ended up in a bunch bandages.

Yes zephyr was postponed due to "Bad Weather" LOLWUT . now on 11-14 Oct , T2 i am not too sure but last weekend (around 25?? ) of oct looks likely. 

In all the idea sounds amazing . YAY!

SOmeone here please fill us on T2 dates !

Cheers !

 Dhananjay Deepak Sathe | +91 976-487-1950
dhananj...@gmail.com,dhananj...@acm.org,f200...@bits-goa.ac.in,
Final Year Undergraduate,
BE(Hons) Electronics and Instrumentation,
BITS Pilani Goa Campus.

[Anant Kamath]

T2 is from the 26th

[Nishith Rastogi]

Can people loop Jay in this thread, and someone from campus, take the ownership of helping organizing this. Everyone will chip in, but someone from Campus needs to take ownership Sather/Emaad/new guys?

Regards
Nishith Rastogi

+91-9663384111
--------------------------------------------
Linux: My 42

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Anant Kamath <kamat...@gmail.com> wrote:

T2 is from the 26th

--

[Ramprasad Joshi]

I suppose some ASCII/Kernel managers must be roped in. They have a duty towards the larger community (CSR? ;-)). I will find one in a couple of days. I saw a request from one of the graduates of an older batch, aspiring for an IIM seat, writing to our HoD for a certificate for "participating in ASCII activities" -- all of which I remember had been limited to a farewell dinner to the outgoing almost organized by themselves. This time the second yearites, especially the IS (Kernel) people, are more enthu and appear more respo. Even the ACM Students' Chapter may be revived.

Hope Dhananjay's injuries are not worrisome. He seems to be also busier than when he had too many instru courses to fend off while doing gsocs. Emaad got his degree (draped in the gown and under the hood etc.) from Dr. Pachauri, and however much the Campus startups may be profitable, he has not much incentive to stay back. So let us not suspect that Emaad is around here on the Campus.

[**OT**] Any ACM ICPC takers?

---

From: Nishith Rastogi <subiet....@gmail.com>
To: lug-b...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, October 8, 2012 9:05 AM

Subject: Re: [lug-bitsgoa] Fest in October

[Emaad Ahmed Manzoor]

> [...] Emaad got

> his degree (draped in the gown and under the hood etc.) from Dr. Pachauri,
> and however much the Campus startups may be profitable, he has not much
> incentive to stay back. So let us not suspect that Emaad is around here on
> the Campus.
>

:-D. @Nishith I won't be able to take ownership of this, but I'll
pitch in wherever I can remotely.

I've managed to set up a local Funnel (for an example of what that is,
see http://funnel.hasgeek.com/paystation/). If we could benefit with
having talk/tutorial submissions and voting of that sort, I'll set it
up on a public host (anyone willing to donate web space for Python
with an sqlite3 DB?).

--
Emaad Ahmed Manzoor

[Nishith Rastogi]

Sorry it slipped out of my mind that you have graduated. 

Regards
Nishith Rastogi

+91-9663384111
--------------------------------------------
Linux: My 42

[Dhananjay Sathe]

No worries. I will take care of on campus logistics etc. Jay rambia and ieee folks ( salil, kamat) are quite clued up and active. Shivam verma too could help us out.

- Sent from my Android mobile device.

[Dhananjay Sathe]

It's a pity the ascii or cs asoc is quite a waste of space :-D the ieee folks are better talented, clued up and enthusiastic. In fact loop in the ieee mailing list. They have the people and infra to help us pull of a great fest. That being said feel free to loop in ascii mailers as well, they could perhaps break tradition and surprise us.

- Sent from my Android mobile device.

[Shivam Verma]

Sure, I'd love to.

Shivam | +91 7507632590
4th Year, Information Systems
BITS-Pilani, Goa Campus.

[Aniket Panse]

I am on campus, and I can help out too.

[Bhaavan Merchant]

I dont think "Having the infrastructure" in place should be a big concern. A quick talk with somebody in quark-core, and willing to have a "Pre-Quark" label will get you another half a dozen of "event-managers". These are the guys required to do  the running around to get the mic working and the  LT booked.

To me the question really is about the talks themselves. The talk can be either "Beginner" level or "Expert" level.
In beginner level, do we have anything at all better to offer than what Andrew Ng already does on Coursera? Or even for NLP?. Also does wrapping what they did on Coursera into a 4 hour talk, will it do justice to the topic itself?

and at an expert level, is there an audience in campus for such stuff  who already have the base set up?


Maybe defining the scope should help.. We could then have a "Intro to Machine Learning" which ends with "... so you can learn about this and more on http://www.coursera.org/ml "

or "Advanced Machine learning" which begins with "Lets apply ML on a camera input. Here this will be an unsupervised, unlabelled ML example".


Just saying this from a few experiences where the talks might have been too naive or advanced for me, and the talk topic would have misguided me. I would just end up cursing a wasted sunday.

Bhaavan Merchant

[Emaad Ahmed Manzoor]

From personal experience I feel there shouldn't be any beginner level talks.

If every speaker narrates his/her experience with building something,
and talks about how they built it, challenges and solutions etc. it'll
be amazing. Preparing these talks, and even finding speakers with
content for these talks, will be pretty challenging.

I read somewhere that directed reading and learning is a hundred times
more effective than meandering through papers/courses without an
objective in mind. Beginners will benefit a lot more from a concrete
and specific problem and solution than an introductory glimpse into a
very vast field.

Emaad Ahmed Manzoor

[Achintya Prakash]

Have to agree with Emaad over there. I think people benefit way more from listening to how something concrete was built, rather than having theory without a context thrown at them. 

My two cents.

[Ramprasad Joshi]

> From: Bhaavan Merchant <bhaavan...@gmail.com>

>Just saying this from a few experiences where the talks might have been too naive or advanced for me, and the talk topic would have misguided me. I would just end up cursing a wasted sunday.

A few experiences may not be enough to conclude generalities. You tell us your expectations, and tell us how to know the potential audience and their expectations, and let us see what we can do. Even showing a coursera video and discussing that afterwards is not a bad idea.

[Ramprasad Joshi]

+1 again and again.

----- Original Message -----
> From: Emaad Ahmed Manzoor <emaadm...@gmail.com>
> To: lug-b...@googlegroups.com
> Cc:
> Sent: Monday, October 8, 2012 3:05 PM
> Subject: Re: [lug-bitsgoa] Fest in October
>

[Bhaavan Merchant]

If every speaker narrates his/her experience with building something,
and talks about how they built it, challenges and solutions etc. it'll
be amazing. Preparing these talks, and even finding speakers with
content for these talks, will be pretty challenging.

Agreed. This should be a priority.

A few experiences may not be enough to conclude generalities. You tell us your expectations, and tell us how to know the potential audience and their expectations, and let us see what we can do.

 

That was exactly my point, about defining the scope of the talks keeping the audience in mind.  I agree with what Emaad has said about having talks on the lines of "<Insert topic name>: My experience with building <insert project name>". This just brings us all on the same page, rather than being vague on such broad topics like ML, NLP etc.

 

Even showing a coursera video and discussing that afterwards is not a bad idea. 

+1.

--
Bhaavan Merchant