PROJECTS IN MACHINE LEARNING, DATA SCIENCE AND ROBOTICS
At the end of October I attended my very first Python conference, PyCon.DE in Karlsruhe. It was a blast, with awesome people and plenty of interesting talks and workshops – I’ll definitely be back! Here are some of my highlights, including links to videos of the talks and interesting projects…
This year’s RoboCup was held in Germany, so of course I had to take this opportunity to go and spend three great days watching robots play soccer and do all kinds of other amazing things! In short, RoboCup is the world championship for robot-soccer. Since 1997, teams all over the world are working to achieve the ultimate goal of the competition: for a group of autonomous robots to beat the human world soccer champions by the middle of the 21st century. Anyone who has had even the smallest exposure to robots or artificial intelligence in general, will agree that this is an ambitious goal. Still, small steps to reaching human-level proficiency are taken every year – for example, this year the color of the goals was changed from yellow to white. What seems like a small change for human eyes, adds another layer of complexity for the robots, as they have to learn to tell apart the goal from the white lines of the soccer field, and other white objects in the background. (It doesn’t help that most of the side fences are also white.)
THE MAD DATA SCIENTIST 