Machine learning (ML) is arguably the most sought after skill in the fields of data and computer science. ML related projects and problems can be done using any programming language.
Developers have been led to believe that, to build and train an ML model, they are restricted to using a select few programming languages— Python, R and Java often top the list.
If our data isn’t good enough, there’s no machine learning tool, platform, or framework that exists that will work well—no matter how good the algorithm is.
So while debugging machine learning models, we also need to make sure our input data is prepared properly. For example the input data may not be a valid data type for a particular feature. Like in case of gender the allowed values are M or F, while the input data may contain other letter values for this feature.
For years now, Snapchat has been at the forefront of mobile machine learning — their popular Lenses, which often combine on-device ML models with augmented reality, have become shining examples of the power and flexibility of on-device machine learning.
Given our respect and admiration for Snap’s work in this area, our team was thrilled to hear about the recent release of SnapML, Snap’s new ML framework inside their development platform Lens Studio (released with 3.0).
Last year, at I/O 2018, Google announced a brand new SDK available for developers: ML Kit. It’s no surprise that Google’s advances in machine learning are miles ahead of what any other company is aiming for. Through this SDK, Google was hoping to help mobile developers bring machine learning to their apps with simple, concise code. As part of the Firebase ecosystem, ML Kit allows developers to implement ML functionality with just a few lines of code; everything from vision to natural language to custom models.
Continue reading Exploring the new ML Kit features on iOS using Swift
One thing I’ve observed in many data science tutorials when it comes to modeling, is that once a certain performance threshold is achieved on test data, rarely is the model deployed/pushed to production—and it’s a common case in the industry more broadly.
This tutorial aims to take modeling a step further by building a REST API and deploying the model into production. In addition to the REST API, we’re building a simple web application that predicts whether a piece of text belongs to any of these classes: atheism, computer graphics, medical science, Christianity, or politics.
Continue reading Deploying and Hosting a Machine Learning Model Using Flask, Heroku and Gunicorn
You must’ve heard about “Vin Rouge” by @Nikhilodeon12 by now. The newly-verified Snap Star Nikhil created this lens, sparking the viral “Silhouette” challenge on TikTok. That’s right, TikTok.
The platform filled with its own filters, special effects, and AR tools. How did a Snapchat Lens end up over there?
Continue reading “How Snapchat Lenses affect TikTok trends — and why Lens Creators are so important”
In my article on lessons from my first deep learning hackathon, I introduced heatmaps. I mentioned that they highlight the regions in an image that the CNN focuses on while trying to make a prediction, and that it would be interesting to learn how they’re generated. Well, I finally know how. Let’s first go back and see what they look like.
In this post, we’re going to investigate the field of image compression and it’s applications in real world. We’ll explore various machine and deep learning techniques for image compression and inspect their pros and cons, and their practical feasibility in real-world scenarios.
So let’s get started!
Image compression refer to reducing the dimensions, pixels, or color components of an image so as to reduce the cost of storing or performing operations on them. Some image compression techniques also identify the most significant components of an image and discard the rest, resulting in data compression as well.
Continue reading Image Compression Using Different Machine Learning Techniques
Google Colab is a cloud-based service that allows the execution of Python code and includes the ability to use and install new libraries. Put simply, you can leverage Google Colab to create a Jupyter Notebook and execute Python code using either a CPU or a free GPU.
Continue reading Getting Started with Google Colab Notebooks
Recently, there has been a huge rise in the implementation of artificial intelligence solutions, with new deep learning architectures being built and deployed across various industries. This rise could be attributed to two important factors:
Deep learning works primarily because of the vast amount of input data on which the deep neural net is trained. Hence, having a good labeled training dataset marks the first step in developing a highly accurate AI solution.
Continue reading Image Manipulation for Machine Learning in R
