A while ago I started exploring the current state of voice interfaces and smart home technology. One particular interesting smart home application is Amazon’s Alexa. It’s a device with a speaker which can answer questions, turn lights on/off, and can give you a so-called flash briefing. You can develop Alexa skills yourself, and publish them in Amazon’s store. Skills are…
World’s longest palindrome?
In honor of the 20th of February, 2002, a palindromic date, Peter Norvig designed his worlds longest unique palindromic sentence of 21,012 words. With a new palindromic date approaching on August 10, 2018 (8102018), I wanted to take some time to see if I could put my own spin on a palindrome world record. While Norvig focused on making his…
Painting by Prime Number
Two weeks ago I stumbled upon the concept of prime portraits. In short, prime portraits are pictures in which each color is assigned a number. When we align every pixel, the result should be a prime number. Because I could not find the code used in the article, I decided to recreate these prime portraits in Python – in color!…
Managing our budget with Excel and machine learning
A little over a year ago my girlfriend Lisette and I moved in together. A big part of living together was getting used to managing a budget, and knowing where our money went. Lisette made one of the coolest Excel spreadsheets I ever saw, the only thing we needed to do was… actually fill in what expense belongs to what…
Autonomous vehicles will lead others through congested cities
This weekend we got the second place in the Hack the Road Hackathon with our idea to let connected vehicles lead other vehicles through a “green wave”. As there will be a long period in which smart vehicles and “dumb” vehicles drive through the same streets, building this system would reduce a lot of traffic problems in the city without…
TRADR SIKS summerschool 2017
A few weeks ago I gave an introductory course to reinforcement learning with the OpenAI Gym environment. As content, I used the writeups I already put on my site several weeks ago. I asked Jasper van der Waa (TNO), who co-organized it, to write a short summary of the summer school. For some years now it is quite clear that…
Detecting bats by recognising their sound with Tensorflow
Last week I discovered that there are bats behind my appartment. I immediately grabbed my “bat detector”: a device that converts the ultrasound signals bats use to echolocate from an inaudible frequency range to an audible one. The name “bat detector” thus is a lie: you can use it to detect bats, but it does not detect bats itself. In…
Introduction to OpenAI gym part 3: playing Space Invaders with deep reinforcement learning
In part 1 we got to know the openAI Gym environment, and in part 2 we explored deep q-networks. We implemented a simple network that, if everything went well, was able to solve the Cartpole environment. Atari games are more fun than the CartPole environment, but are also harder to solve. This session is dedicated to playing Atari with deep…
Introduction to OpenAI gym part 2: building a deep q-network
In part 1 we used a random search algorithm to “solve” the cartpole environment. This time we are going to take things to the next level and implement a deep q-network.The OpenAI gym environment is one of the most fun ways to learn more about machine learning. Especially reinforcement learning and neural networks can be applied perfectly to the benchmark…
Getting started with OpenAI gym
The OpenAI gym environment is one of the most fun ways to learn more about machine learning. Especially reinforcement learning and neural networks can be applied perfectly to the benchmark and Atari games collection that is included. Every environment has multiple featured solutions, and often you can find a writeup on how to achieve the same score. By looking at…