I’ve worked at 5-10 different organizations, most of them were startups or startuppy companies. I’ve done a lot of planning in small teams, and also taken part in company-wide leadership planning. Here I will describe what has worked well for me in small team settings, focusing on time estimation.

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The meta-goal of goaling is to stretch yourself to achieve more, and to feel good about what you’ve achieved. Whatever happened this year, it’s always possible to achieve a lot more and feel better about yourself next year. To hijack a Feynman quote, there is plenty of room at the top.

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2019 was another big year for Pytorch, one of the most popular Deep Learning libraries out there. Pytorch has become the de facto deep learning library used for research thanks to it’s dynamic graph model which allows fast model experimentation. It’s also become production ready, with support for mobile and infrastructure tooling such as Tensorboard.

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I look at some fundamental charts of Apple, Activision Blizzard and Intel.

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I show calibration curves for four different binary classification Scikit-Learn models we built for delivery prediction at Fetchr, trained using real-world data: LogisticRegression, DecisionTree, RandomForest and GradientBoosting.

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I use simulated self-play by ranking episodes by summed reward. Game outcomes are divided in two by cutting at the median, winners are assigned +1 rewards, losers are assigned -1 rewards, like in games like Go and Chess. Unlike naive policy gradient descent used in previous posts, this version solves all OpenAI classic control problems, albeit slowly.

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I try to generalize the policy gradient algorithm as introduced earlier to solve all the OpenAI classic control problems. It works for CartPole and Acrobot, but not for Pendulum and MountainCar environments.

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Opportunities for automating, optimizing and enabling processes with ML at a delivery company such as Fetchr are plentiful. We put three families of ML models into production. These 3 areas are: Scheduling, Notifications and Operational choice.

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The CartPole problem is the Hello World of Reinforcement Learning, originally described in 1985 by Sutton et al. The environment is a pole balanced on a cart. CartPole is one of the environments in OpenAI Gym, so we don't have to code up the physics. Here I walk through a simple solution using Pytorch.

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The idea is simple: write a document which helps new and existing people—both managers and individual contributors—get an objective, metrics-based picture of the business. This is helpful when new people join, when people start working in new segments of the business, and to understand other parts of the company.

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Using historic gameplay between strong Go players as training data, a CNN model is built to predict good Go moves on a standard 19x19 Go board.

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While working on arabic-vs-rest classification, I was curious how good out-of-the-box models perform with publicly available data, and then compare that with what we can achieve with internal data / features derived from millions of deliveries. We train Scikit-learn and Pytorch models for this classification task and achieve 90% prediction accuracy on publicly available data and out-of-the-box models, while internally 99% is achievable.

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I use PyMC3 to solve the food delivery toy problem and explore some alternative priors.

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Most A/B testing tools default to α=0.05, meaning the expected false positive rate is 5%. In this post I explore the trade-offs between moving fast, ie. using higher α, versus being sure, ie. using lower α.

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I was grabbing a burger at Shake Shack, Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, when I noticed this notebook on the counter. The staff is using it to track food deliveries and each service (Carriage, Talabat, UberEats, Deliveroo) has its own column with the order numbers. Let's assume this is the only page for the day, and ask ourselves: given this data, what is the probability that UberEats is the most popular food delivery service?.

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The Collatz conjecture is a conjecture in mathematics that concerns a sequence defined as follows: start with any positive integer n. Then each term is obtained from the previous term as follows: if the previous term is even, the next term is one half the previous term. If the previous term is odd, the next term is 3 times the previous term plus 1. The conjecture is that no matter what value of n, the sequence will always reach 1.

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It’s easy to build a CNN that does well on MNIST digit classification. How easy is it to break it, to distort the images and cause the model to misclassify?

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CIFAR-10 is a classic image recognition problem, consisting of 60,000 32x32 pixel RGB images (50,000 for training and 10,000 for testing) in 10 categories: plane, car, bird, cat, deer, dog, frog, horse, ship, truck. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) do really well on CIFAR-10, achieving 99%+ accuracy. The Pytorch distribution includes an example CNN for solving CIFAR-10, at 45% accuracy. I will use that and merge it with a Tensorflow example implementation to achieve 75%. We use torchvision to avoid downloading and data wrangling the datasets. Like in the MNIST example, I use Scikit-Learn to calculate goodness metrics and plots.

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MNIST is a classic image recognition problem, specifically digit recognition. It contains 70,000 28x28 pixel grayscale images of hand-written, labeled images, 60,000 for training and 10,000 for testing. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) do really well on MNIST, achieving 99%+ accuracy. The Pytorch distribution includes a 4-layer CNN for solving MNIST. Here I will unpack and go through this example. We use torchvision to avoid downloading and data wrangling the datasets. Finally, instead of calculating performance metrics of the model by hand, I will extract results in a format so we can use SciKit-Learn's rich library of metrics.

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I use the standard Iris dataset for supervised learning with a Support Vector Machine model using Pytorch's autograd.

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