Teaching the Machine.

Progress update.

Well, I have not stopped working on SEAR-RL. I have just taken a small break to focus on a different aspect of it.

While I look for a full-time job, I have continued to take classes UK, this semester it was an Interactive Machine Learning graduate level class. As usual, my education has been a trial by fire, but for the most part I am enjoying it and learning a lot.

For, my semester project I decided to work on something to extend SEAR-RL. I am curious if I can build a neural-net model using the depth data from the Occipital Structure to identify important pedestrian obstacles. Specifically, I want SEAR-RL to id stairs, for walking up and down, and ledges someone could fall off. I have completed the data collection portion of the project, and collected about 5 gigs of data. Now, comes the building the deep neural net.

Fortunately, while taking the UK class, I have been supplementing my education with Andrew Ng’s Deep Learning Course, as well as a great book “Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems.”

It is scary because like most things I end up wanting to do in life, there is no formal process to learn what I want to learn and do. For example, unfortunately I was just off-cycle in the curriculum to be able to take the Machine Learning classes during my proper graduate studies. So now that I taking a graduate level class, I am having to learn everything at high speed and by fire just to complete the course. [I have tried to complain to the management of the universe I get tired of this recurring theme in my life, but oh well. Maybe someday, I can do something I want without feeling under the gun for once.]

In general, I guess I just wish I knew what to do with SEAR-RL. I am not sure it is enough to turn into a business. Not to mention, business acumen is not my thing. But you think in a world where tech companies keep trying to push Augmented Reality tech, there might be a place.

I just do not know.

Anyway, that is the update.