[ml] Change of formats for ML group

[Josh Myer]

Hi,

I'm your friendly ML Wednesday Host/Mad Hatter.  As such, I'm getting
ready to declare "Let's all move one place on", and wanted to bring
everybody up to speed and see how that goes.

In the past, we've done a lot of lectures at ML Wednesday; those went
okay, but they weren't always so popular.  In particular, not everyone
could follow every lecture, so attendance was kind of churning: people
would come for a week or three, then drop out for a month.

To try and keep people engaged, we did some more workshop-like things,
which went really really well (neural networks), but were hard to keep
going.  It was especially hard to keep the whole group on the same
page--it required too many blocking steps to resync everyone to the
same stage of progress.

More recently, we've had just a single project going, which has
basically killed attendance (but damn they've been fun).  It's been
fun, but we went from a high attendance of 15 people down to tonight
being probably just Ted and I.

So, I'd like to try changing things up again.  Sensebridge, the cyborg
group, has had really good luck with lots of smaller projects going on
concurrently.  They just get together to hack, and occasionally give
presentations, etc.  This seems like it could be a good model for us
now, given that we have more people with more experience using
techniques and tools.  I'd love to see some people play with Mario AI,
while others work on the WiiMote project, etc, all with other people
around to ask questions or offer support.

To do this, we need two things: project ideas and a bit of
focus/dedication to making it happen regularly.  I believe we can pull
this off, but it requires a bit more work from people than we've had
in the past.

So, who's got project ideas?  Who wants to work on what kinds of
problems?  If you've got one, start a new thread on this list, and
hopefully we'll be able to build up resources (techniques, libraries,
and people) to see which projects we can get going.

Let's move one place on!
-- 
Josh Myer   650.248.3796
  josh at joshisanerd.com