[ml] Change of formats for ML group

[John J. Kaufman]

So, there seems to be (at least) two kinds of people interested in the group:

1. People who just want to learn/talk about ML stuff
2. People who want to work on ML projects

I'm firmly in the first camp (though I do think some coding can help the learning process), and I think it is a necessary step for people to go through before they get to the second group (after which they burn out and move back to camp 1 and start oscillating forever more).

I think if we can find an undergrad level text on ML, it would give something for Camp 1s to do, either singly or with others... and the Camp 2 project folks can be there hacking and recruiting.

-John J. Kaufman
(aka Fritz, depending on context)

-----Original Message-----
>From: Josh Myer <josh at joshisanerd.com>
>Sent: Sep 2, 2009 7:19 PM
>To: ml at lists.noisebridge.net
>Subject: [ml] Change of formats for ML group
>
>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
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