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Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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StrongSteam’s first novel OCR matching API (Python demo)

ArtificialIntelligence, Life, Python, StrongSteam May 11, 2012

Here’s a preview of our first novel API in StrongSteam. We’ve been working with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for a while, we set ourselves the task of matching a noisy photograph of some text to a pre-seeded database of entries. If you follow my blog you’ll already have seen our example iPhone app for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London (developed in collaboration with Kasabi):

Now rather than having to re-label 10,000 Latin plant labels with QR codes Kew can now use our matching technology on their existing labels to enrich a visitor’s experience of the gardens (and it turns out that a lot of visitors have iPhones and use Kew’s official app).

With our API we can do the same kind of task with photos of plaques from the London Science Museum where we match against 836 entries scraped from the Science Museum website. In the following video we match against text from the information plaque of Old Bess (née ‘Beelzebub’) in the Energy Hall:

This is just a preview, we’ve sent the Python & cURL API to some of our alpha users and will be inviting more in over the coming month. Here are some more OCR videos and here’s a work-in-progress demo of our image matching (using PhoneGap on an Android):

If you’d like to get access to our RESTful cloud-based computer vision APIs please sign-up on our StrongSteam homepage. Soon we’ll be adding raw OCR (with co-ordinates and font size reports) and image matching (particularly for stuff like brand logos and beer labels).

We’re super-keen to hear about your use cases and needs – please send me an email (ian AT strongsteam.com) and tell me what you need. We used to work on these problems in my consultancy (Mor Consulting), now we’re working to make our IP more available to all.

Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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Python Introductory Course (OpenSource, StartupChile)

Python May 6, 2012

We’ve just run 5 of the 6 nights of our Introductory Python course here in Santiago for StartupChile. The course aims to ‘give back’ to the Chilean economy by helping more people learn to program (we had a mix of locals and StartupChile members in our classes). In total we’ve taught 25 people (only 5 women though!). Here’s the group on the first night:

Initially I’d planned to run my 12 hour (2 day) course to one group of 15 people. In total over 80 people indicated that they wanted to attend the course so I split it into two groups of 15 (of the 80 a total of 27 committed to the available dates). We started this last Monday, we finished Group A last night (Saturday night late night coding lessons FTW!) and we finish Group B on Monday.

Both groups had prior coding experience (I said you’d need to know about variables, command line access etc) but little experience with Python. We covered 3 of the pythonchallenges and looked at:

  • IDLE immediate mode and for writing modules
  • variables, logic, loops
  • functions
  • id, mutable and immutable types
  • simple debugging and documentation
  • importing modules, using pip

I’ve open-sourced the course as Python in 6 Hours, you can grab the slides (ppt/pdf) and solutions to the two exercises from Github. This isn’t a deep/thorough introduction to Python, it is aimed at taking people with existing experience in another language into Python whilst covering some of the less-often-covered basics (like id, mutability etc).

If you’d like to run your own 6 hour Python course then feel very free to grab the notes and have a crack.

 

Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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Demos for Botanical Garden Label Matcher from StrongSteam

Life, Python, StrongSteam March 31, 2012

After a fair bit of graft we’ve finished our first product using StrongSteam – a Latin Botanical Garden label matcher (AKA “OpenPlants”) which runs at Kew Gardens, Wakehurst Place and other botanical gardens in Europe that use the usual black rectangular labels. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about then these 30 second demo videos should make it clear:

Update – I totally should have added that we built this app in partnership with Kasabi using their DBPedia dataset.

Update – a screencast showing how the API can match a photo from the London Science Museum‘s energy hall (with ‘Beelzebub’!) to the right web page is available.

 

 

As you can see you photograph the plant label, we use optical character recognition to read what’s on the sign and then we bring back relevant information from wikipedia about the Family and Genus including pictures and links to other resources. We’ll launch this as a free app in a few weeks.

Seeing as StrongSteam is a cloud based API it makes sense to show it being used from another platform. Here’s a screencast showing a webcam on a Linux laptop taking a photograph of a printed plant label using our Python API which is uploaded and recognised, with the results being shown in the local web browser:

We’ll launch the alpha OCR API for developers in April. Add your email to the email list on our homepage to get an announce. Once the iPhone app is available we’ll also announce it here.

Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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2nd Data/AI Meetup – official SUP event at Santiago’s hackerspace next Wednesday

ArtificialIntelligence, Life, StartupChile, StrongSteam March 30, 2012

I’m very chuffed to say that our 2nd AI/Data/API meetup will take place next Wednesday 4th April  7pm at the Santiago MakerSpace at Avenida Italia 850 (map). The HackerSpace is a 15 minute walk south/east from the CMI office, just off of Bilbao.

UPDATE we’re meeting at 7pm (not 7.30pm) and we have an extra speaker – Skype co-founder Ahti Heinla will tell the “Real story behind the Skype success story” in an extra 30 minute slot. Here’s the Meetup announce with full details. Remember to Attend if you’re coming and do UnAttend if you realise you can’t make it later (the numbers are limited).

The event is free (but bring cash for the specialist beer – see end of this post). Our four speakers will talk for 15 minutes each:

  • Ian and Kyran with StrongSteam with live demos of optical character recognition (OCR) and artwork recognition mobile apps (angellist)
  • Tim of BackYardBrains – “Curious about how your brain works? With the help of our friends the humble Amazonian cockroach, we will teach you the electrical properties of neurons.” – will include demos and hardware you can buy (angellist)
  • Ashley of PaperHater will give a live demo of their receipt/paper scanning and OCR application and talk about how they created a spinoff
  • Javier Gramajo of SQMOS will give a live demo of their augmented reality Android app (angellist)

StrongSteam and BackYardBrains are Round 2, PaperHater is in Round 3 and SQMOS are staying in Santiago after Round 1. Stick around after to learn about the hackerspace and drink Ignacio’s specialist beers.

The Maker/Hacker Space is the first in Santiago, here’s some news about their launch and they have a circuit building workshop  on 6-8th April. In this space you will find:

  • 3D printers
  • Robots with legs and robots that fly
  • 8 bit computers
  • Pinball machines
  • Dirty work space (CNC lathe and other construction equipment)
  • Lots of creative equipment that you can use to build electronic, mechanical, art and music things if you choose to become a member

Ignacio Correa of ClubCervezas will bring along specialist Chilean beers (to buy) – he took us on a beer tasting night in Bario Brasil a couple of weeks back and introduced us to a whole range of lovely local beers (300 microbreweries!) that we hadn’t tasted before. Bring some money if you’d like to try unusual and hard-to-find Chilean beers (my pockets will be stuffed with cash).

Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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