Thoughts on data science, statistics and machine learning.
Rabies, Laziness & Privilege
It was the night of the recent 5-state assembly elections. One of my company’s clients is a major news channel, and I was at the studio late into the night, until the election commission announced that they had cancelled their press conference which was supposed to make an announcement about the final vote counts in Madhya Pradesh. A colleague offered to drop me home, and I got off at the gate of my colony, not wanting to subject my colleague to navigating the labyrinth that is any gated colony in South Delhi.
Weighted Loss Functions for Instance Segmentation
This post is a follow up to my talk, Practical Image Classification & Object Detection at PyData Delhi 2018. You can watch the talk here: and see the slides here. I spoke at length about the different kinds of problems in computer vision and how they are interpreted in deep learning architectures. I spent a fair bit of time on instance and semantic segmentation (for an introduction to these problems, watch Justin Johnson’s lecture from the Stanford CS231 course here).
Book Review: In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck
I have a pretty good Steinbeck collection, but this wasn’t a book I was going to read anytime soon. But I recently came across the movie adaptation and decided that other Steinbeck titles could wait. James Franco and John Steinbeck is a very attractive combination. First of all, this book is not about communism. The eponymous battle is not a battle of the classes. It’s more of a battle men fight with themselves.
How Not to Ask Questions After a Talk
Dedicated to the memory of Mrutyunjay Mishra (M2). He was a torrent of ideas. He encouraged me to write this post because as much as he talked endlessly without pausing to breathe, he hated wasteful discourse. New Delhi, January 2024 PyCon India 2017 ended last weekend in Delhi. The conference escaped the infamous winter smog-storm by a whisker. In the last few years, PyCon India has grown to become the largest PyCon outside of North America, with over a thousand participants attending from all over the country.