[Noisebridge-discuss] [ml] ML meetup: sociological datasets (Thursday 1/19 @ 6:30pm)

[David Knupp]

Hi all,

Just an brief introduction, and a question. I'm developing an interest in 
machine learning, but I'm pretty much a complete ML newbie. I started 
trying to take the class being offered by Stanford last quarter, but the 
insanity of the holidays plus various end-of-year job-related deadlines 
all combined to make it pretty much a hopeless venture. I have much higher 
hopes this next time around. (I believe the class starts up again on the 
23rd.)

I'm an artist-turned-QA engineer by day, and fairly handy with python and 
perl, though I don't have any experience with R. I don't have an extensive 
math background, but I didn't find the math in the ML class too hard to 
follow along with.

I don't know what kind of things this group covered in the past. I'm 
wondering whether there's a place of the uninitiated like myself.

In any event, I may try to stop by this evening.

Thanks,
--d.


On Thu, 19 Jan 2012, Mike Schachter wrote:

> Hey everyone, I'll be 15-30 minutes late to the ML meetup
> tonight. See you then (by 7:00pm)!
> 
>   mike
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 6:03 PM, Mike Schachter <mschachter at eigenminds.com> wrote:
>       Hello everyone!
>
>       I'm keen on restarting the machine learning
>       meetups this year. Here's our wiki page for
>       the uninitiated:
>
>       https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Machine_Learning
>
>       My focus on data this year will be sound
>       and government&census data, and applications
>       relevant to Noisebridge itself.
>
>       Sound because I work with brain cells in the auditory
>       system, and government data because there's
>       a potential treasure trove of very relevant machine
>       learning applications for data accessible online,
>       with potential to for helping our crumbling democracy
>       and such.
>
>       So this Thursday, 6:30pm, in either the Church
>       or Turing room, come over and help me brainstorm
>       some ideas for datasets to work with. Next week
>       I'm going to teach a workshop on Random Forests
>       in R.
>
>       Some sites with datasets I'm looking through:
>
>       http://fec.gov/
>       http://www.opensecrets.org/
>       opengovernment.org
>       http://thomas.loc.gov
>       http://openstates.org/
>       http://www.votesmart.org/
>       http://www.opencongress.org/
>       http://www.govtrack.us/
>       http://www.census.gov
> 
> 
> 
>