Thoughts and insights from the 2016 NIPS conference
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Other articles
Deep Learning on Windows: A Getting Started Guide
Python List Comprehensions Gone Crazy
Recently, I was messing around with some image recognition tasks in Python, and wanted to take a look at some of the images in my training set. At first, I was tempted to go open file explorer and walk around the directory tree spot-checking a few, but then I remembered …
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TensorFlow on Azure Using Docker
We live in a time of proliferating machine learning toolkits. From the not-so-humble start of OpenCV (for computer vision), Weka, and Caffe, in just a short period of time we've added Torch, Theano, CNTKand now TensorFlowand SystemML (and I'm not even mentioning things like SparkMLand AzureML). As …
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Leader Election in Node.js Using Azure Blob Storage
Leader Election is a mechanism for designating one instance of a group as the primary (or leader) and the others as secondaries (or followers), and is typically used for coordination amongst groups of machines in a distributed system. I first learned of leader election back in the olden times of …
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Managing a Corpus of Images in Azure Blob Storage
As mentioned in my previous post I was recently working on a project training Deep ConvNets for image recognition. As with any Machine Learning project one of the primary things you need to make it successful is large amounts of data - quality labeled data. With image-based convnets, though, the data …
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Image Stream Processing to Blob Storage
I was recently working on a project to train Deep ConvNets for image recognition tasks, and ran into several interesting problems along the way. This post is the first in a series outlining some of those problems and how I went about solving them, and it focuses on the problem …
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Real-time Mapping with SignalR and Event Hubs
One of my recent projects had to do with watching people moving around the city - not in a creepy stalker way, but trying to get some sense of where people congregated and general walking traffic flow. As anyone who has dealt with large data, especially large geo data can tell …
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My Trip to CascadiaFest
... or "who knew there was anything in Blaine, Washington?"
I got back recently from giving my first talk at CascadiaFest 2015, held in the beautiful Semiahmoo Resort outside of Blaine, WA. As a long-term Seattle resident, my only knowledge of Blaine was as "that place where we spend too much …
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Using Project Oxford To Pull Entities From Images
I love my job. Less than a week after watching the amazing announcements at //Build2015, I had a chance to try using some of them on a real project as part of a hackathon. Unfortunately, I can't share the actual problem they are trying to solve, but the work itself …
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Storm Bolts Using Reactive Extensions
Time-Series Processing in Azure ML Using Python
With the general availability of Azure Machine Learning, the team has added a ton of new features. Perhaps the one I'm most excited about is the addition of a general "Execute Python Script" module. I've been meaning to brush up on my Python skills, and with the inclusion of Pandas …
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Collaboration on Open-Source Node Projects
I've been working on a Node-based AMQP 1.0 library and wrappers that allow it to talk ServiceBus and EventHub easily with a colleague of mine at work, and it's taught me many things about doing Node.js development, collaborating on GitHub, and publishing on npmjs. The documentation is mostly …
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Node.js and .NET Talking EventHub, Together
Over the past few months, I've been working on a Node.js client for AMQP 1.0 - the lingua franca of Azure's EventHub and ServiceBus. Well, the EventHub support is just about complete, and ServiceBus Topics and Queues should follow shortly thereafter (it's just me working on it, so it's …
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Data Cleaning with AzureML and R: Dates
I've been working with AzureMLfor a while now, and it's fantastic. Having done ML in a few other platforms over the years, the ease with which I can put together a few regression models, do parameter-sweeps, and compare results is just groundbreaking.
However, one area where it isn't quite …
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I Miss Integers
Talking to EventHub with AMQP 1.0
Developing on Windows
This isn't a long post, I just wanted to shout-out my colleague Felix Rieseberg, who has a great postoutlining a whole selection of tools to help you get up and running with a Windows development environment. The most notable is probably Chocolatey NuGet, which if you're a long-term Windows …
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Caching Responses in Expressjs
On a recent project, I found myself writing a web service in Node via Azure Mobile Services, and realized that the client pattern was to call a common set of requests on startup and in early interactions, and then dig down into more detailed requests. Furthermore, these common requests were …
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Talking to EventHub from Node
This past week, I participated in a hackfest trying to get some Alljoyn devices talking to Nitrogen. It was a great time, getting to learn some new technologies, get exposed to the ~~pain ~~wonder of working with IoT hardware, and watch my bosses (John Shewchuk and Tracey Trewin) sling some …
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Azure Storage: Architecture Troubleshooting
I've been dealing with Azure Storage for years now, and while most of the time it's rock solid, on occasion you can get hit with networking issues or other "brownout" drops in availability that can make you question your sanity. I find it helpful to know what's going on behind …
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Running Azure Mobile Services Locally
On a recent project, I made my first foray into using Azure Mobile Services Custom API support, with a Node.js-backed API implementation. I've used (and loved) Mobile Services in the past for their push notification infrastructure, but this was new ground for me. I liked the easy setup - trivial …
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Old IE, New Vagrant
Distributed Systems Primer
Henry Robinson, the smart Cloudera SDE behind The Paper Trail blog, just posted a great primer on distributed systems. I highly recommend anyone interested in this field go and take a look - if you've been around long enough, you'll have read most of the papers, but it's a good collection …
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SQL vs. NoSQL
I was recently asked by a colleague of mine why anyone is even using NoSQL solutions at all, and not just sticking with SQL. After telling them that people use them because they're web-scale, I did some thinking about when you should use NoSQL vs. just sticking with good old …
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Starting Fresh
I've decided to move from my MSDN blog to my own WordPress site. No big deal, since my cobweb of a blog hadn't been updated in years, but you might notice that this site is much younger than most of the posts on it. I've migrated my old posts and …
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Duck Typing in C# 4.0
One of my favorite new features in C# 4.0 is the dynamic keyword. Not only does it allow you to do freaky things with interactions between C# and scripting languages like IronRuby, but it opens up one of my favorite features from that language – Duck Typing.
Duck typing is …
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Misusing Infer.NET For Fun and Profit
Using Java Concurrency Primitives: ReadWriteLock
Writing a Powershell Snapin for Bing
Java’s Checked vs. Unchecked Exceptions
“You can’t use that, it’s not performant”