Archives of Life

Writing a High Performance Python book

I’m terribly excited to announce that I’m co-authoring an O’Reilly book on High Performance Python, to be published next year. My co-author is the talented Micha Gorelick (github @mynameisfiber) of bit.ly, he’s already written a few chapters, I’ll be merging an updated version of my older eBook and adding content based on past tutorials (PyCon […]
11 years ago

EuroSciPy 2013 write-up

The conference is over, tomorrow I’m sticking around to Sprint on scikit-learn. As last year it has been a lot of fun to catch up with colleagues out here in Brussels. Here’s Logilab’s write-up. Yesterday I spoke on Building an Open Source Data Science company. Topics included how companies benefit from open sourcing their tools, […]
11 years ago

Some Natural Language Processing and ML Papers

After I spoke at DataScienceLondon in June I was given a set of paper references by a couple of people (the bulk were by Levente Török) – thanks to all. They’re listed below. Along the same lines I have one machine learning paper aimed at beginners to recommend (“A Few Useful Things to Know about […]
11 years ago

Visualising the internals of Logistic Regression on a Text Matrix

Below I have some plots that visualise the term matrix (as a binary matrix and as a TF-IDF matrix) for the brand disambiguation project followed by a visualisation of the coefficients used in scikit-learn’s LogisticRegression classifier using l1 and l2 penalties. Using a CountVectorizer with binary=True we can mark the absence or presence of a […]
11 years ago

Active Countermeasures for Privacy in a Social Networking age?

This is a bit of a rambling post covering some thoughts on data privacy, mobile phones and social networking. A general and continued decrease in personal privacy  seems inevitable in our age of data (NSA Files at The Guardian). We generate a lot of data, we rarely know how or where it is stored and […]
11 years ago

Thoughts from a month’s backpacking honeymoon

I’m publishing this on the hoof, right now we’re in Istanbul near the end of our honeymoon back home. Here are some app-travelling notes (for our Nexus 4 Androids). Google Translate offers Offline dictionaries for all the European languages, each is 150mb. We downloaded new ones before each country hop. Generally they were very useful, […]
11 years ago

June project: Disambiguating “brands” in Social Media

Having returned from Chile last year, settled in to consulting in London, got married and now on honeymoon I’m planning on a change for June. I’m taking the month off from clients to work on my own project, an open sourced brand disambiguator for social media. As an example this will detect that the following […]
11 years ago

Visualising London, Brighton and the UK using Geo-Tweets

Recently I’ve been grabbing Tweets some some natural language processing analysis (in Python using NetworkX and NLTK) – see this PyCon and PyData conversation analysis. Using the London dataset (visualised in the PyData post) I wondered if the geo-tagged tweets would give a good-looking map of London. It turns out that it does: You can […]
11 years ago

More Python 3.3 downloads than Python 2.7 for past 3 months

Since PyCon 2013 I’ve been in a set of conversations that start with “should I be using Python 3.3 for science work?”. Here’s a recent reddit thread on the subject. Last year I solidly recommended using Python 2.7 for scientific work (as many key libraries weren’t yet supported). I’m on the cusp of changing my […]
11 years ago