Introducing each other

[Muhamad Sherif]

Hi Guys,
I am Muhamad from egypt a s/w Engineer and I am a master degree
student, actually I am now live in dublin for a while (working for a
software company here)

may each of you introduce himself to us to know our resources :)

[Jo Jordan]

Hi Muhamad from Egypt currently in Dublin!

I'm Jo Jordan.. I live in north Bucks .. basically about 50 miles
north of London and not quite in the Midlands. Farming country.

I am a psychologist but I've use computers a lot. Glad to have a
coder on board... what are your preferred languages? And are you
interested in doing a project? Roko intends to do a PhD in Machine
Learning and I'm happy to see what he wants to do before I decide.


Jo

On Oct 3, 6:01 pm, Muhamad Sherif <mohamed_sherie...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

[alessiot]

Hi All,


I'm Alessio Tomasino: I'm originally from Italy, but I've been living
in the UK for the last 7 years. I hold an MSc in ML from UCL, but I
decided to join this course to refresh some of the material I studied
and to learn something new. I'll try to use open-source software for
this course such as OCtave or NumPy. If anyone is interested in
developing some of these algorithms in map/reduce (hadoop), please let
me know.

Best of luck everyone.

Alessio

[Jo Jordan]

Wow.. what are you doing now?

[Jo Jordan]

Do you know, do we open-sourcers get to do the project and if we do,
are you wanting to do one? Roko has flagged up some links of the
other thread.

Jo

On Oct 3, 8:14 pm, alessiot <alessio.tomas...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Jo Jordan]

Hi again Muhamad..did you see the links flagged up by Roko on the
other thread... Would be interested in what you think.

Jo

On Oct 3, 7:08 pm, Jo Jordan <jo.working...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Muhamad Sherif]

Hi Jo Jordan
sorry I didn't notice this link before now , I am watching the video
now
anyway Guys I joined this course to learn new (Tools, Technologies,
Algorithms, and of course you Guys)
so I've no problem to start in any topic u suggest and will be useful
for all of us

[rmijic]

OK, so I am Roko I live in Oxford itself, and I'd be interested in
meeting up here in Oxford sometime if the more local people are up for
it.

On Oct 3, 6:01 pm, Muhamad Sherif <mohamed_sherie...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

[JuliaV1]

Hi, I'm Julia and I currently live in London. It's not going to be
possible for me to get to Oxford unfortunately, but really wanted to
be involved in a UK based study group so at least we're all on the
same timezone : )

I signed up for the Machine Learning course as I have an interest in
this field and would like to learn more and expand my knowledge of
this very interesting subject.

I'm looking forward to exploring the program Octave but have no
experience of this. If it helps I will start a new discussion and post
some helpful links for people to get the most out of this software.
Would you find that useful?

Nice to meet you all and I hope we have a great course.

Good luck.

[Ian Stevens]

Hi all,

I am doing this course along with the AI one if I can manage both. I'm
doing the courses mainly out of interest, but can see that some of the
knowledge could be useful in my work. I'd be up for meeting in Oxford
as I'm only an hour away.

I'm planning on continuing to use Octave as it seems to be great for
experimentation and visualisation, but will likely port algorithms to
Common Lisp (which I'm also learning) so they can be used with other
AI algorithms for a yet-to-be-decided project.

Ian.

[Jo Jordan]

Hello Ian

I am also enrolled for the AI project and really just following for
interest. (But mean to complete it well.)

Do you have an AI group set up?

[Jo Jordan]

Hi Julia..well it seems we are gathering the UK/Ireland based people
here and we can take if from there.

Another thread on Octave would be good.

Jo

[Ian Stevens]

Hi Jo,

Ah it's good there are others doing both courses. I've been reading
through the AIMA book recommended for the course, written by Stuart
Russell and Peter Norvig, and it's very good, though expensive!

There's a large group at http://groups.google.com/group/london-stanford-study-group-fall-2011?hl=en
which I'm a member of and this covers all 3 Stanford courses - AI, ML
and Databases. They've had a couple of meet-ups already (Old Street,
EC2) to go through some of the maths topics that are useful to know.

Ian.

[m]

I'm a statistician at Oxford uni. I will be programming in python -
I'd really recommend it for coding up machine learning algorithms.
Later on I'm keen on study sessions in Oxford if there are any locals
around.

[rmijic]

Yes, definitely count me in for Oxford study sessions. I could
probably do with learning python, I have heard that the difference
between a true Haxor and a total n00b is whether they can knock up a
python script to do pretty much anything... as for myself I code in
visual basic and I have done some C too.

[Andrew Scott]

Hi all

I'm Andrew, I live out near Stow, but am due to move into Oxford city in a few week / months (all kinda depends on when we can find a place).  

I have been writing software since I left uni, where I read Mechanical Engineering, with my brother for our own consultancy company.  Aside of learning different programming languages, I've not done any real studying since, some 10+ years ago!

As for development languages, the usual suspects, C / C++.  Currently I'm using C# for about 65% of my time, along with the obligatory HTML/CSS/JavaScript.  The remainder of my time is spent using GoLang (http://golang.org/), I only wish it was more of my time.  I feel that GoLang is a great fit for ML, with it's focus on concurrency and how it "feels" like a dynamic language while being statically typed.  

One of the main thrusts to taking the course is that a lot of my work involves large datasets, albeit making tools & systems to manage this data in an efficient way, I'd like to be able to expose additional features and helpers to my users through ML/AI. (oh yeah I'm also doing the AI class) 

So far I'm finding the ML class much nicer, the content is rich and very well organised, very little ambiguity - unlike the AI Class.  I hope the AI Class will improve with time. 

That's about it really, I'd be interested in a meetup.  I already attend a small GoLang meetup in Oxford, that meets sporadically in the "Living Room" near Oxford castle. 

Andy

[rmijic]

yeah, I'd be interested in meeting up. The living room is a good
location actually, though not too late or it'll get too noisy. It'd be
great to talk to someone who knows a lot about programming - I am much
more up to date on maths than code! Now, time to stop procrastinating
the Octave questions...

Are you up for perhaps next weekend?