[ml] last weeks meeting

[Brian Morris]

There were three visitors and I was sort of left representing the group.

One guy and I talked for a while. He said he had worked with NetBSD
and I picked his brains for a while around embedded systems and the
current situation around that with regards to Linux taking over.

I mentioned I had recently found some "interesting" (eg in generally
ML terms)  examples in a book called something like "Wicked Cool Java"
and he supported me getting into that (I haven't done any but I have
some packages in my collection I might enjoy trying also). He
supported me I should check the Java out.

Then we talked about ML in the context of Text Analysis / Data Mining.
Conceptually -- what is need, what is happening / not in the industry,
what are some good ideas that should / could be looked into more.  We
had some common background in this area so we had a pretty good
informal / motivational talk I thought. I left feeling I might want to
continue my work in this area, where I have been kinda losing
motivation, but I mentioned I was hoping for to get together with some
association around it and I still feel that is pretty important to my
continuing (maybe I could be more assertive about making online
contacts though I will admit), and I still feel that is a major factor
for me.

(Of course)  I put in / practiced my plug for autonomous / competitive
agent based ML/EA... (very briefly in a few sentences).

We also talked a little bit about what the others in ML group were
doing or thinking about doing, particularly about interfacing with the
robotics people on dealing with environmental data and in particular
IR sensing. I mentioned the face recognition problem and the code I
had brought but that I didn't really have any familiarity with the
problem, I also mentioned the deep learning example (Utube video /
animal type recognition). He showed me some funny animation / cartoon
stuff partially machine generated (of the cartoons given a sound track
input) that he had found on you tube. He also mentioned some open
source cataloguing and preferential suggestion software that he knew
of but he could not locate it on the spot

The other two visitor people were together and just sort of looked in
a couple times and wandered around NB in between. I am not sure how
much they were listening in or if they were interested in what we were
talking about, they did not participate.

Brian