My Machine Learning Journey #1: Background and Choosing My Next Project

I am documenting perhaps also because Gary V said so too.

Hey friends, I am here to document my Machine Learning journey. I really felt the need to start documenting stuff after having spent two months building my first website at http://www.roadmapedia.com

I have learned so much from those two months, solved so many problems, and had so many dopamine rushes! But I never recorded myself the exact moment I had those enlightenment and dopamine rushes, and FUCK!!! Those were footages that I can show to my grandchildren, my friends and family, and to the world. And more importantly, I think Machine Learning has been regarded with a high barrier of entry (we take the Ph.D. nuclear physicists and pure math majors, screw the rest), but this is simply not the case. I have none of those titles but I am gonna continue anyway. This journey is also my attempt to eliminate the excuses of those who are just pondering and never starting.

So I am not missing out on this one. I am going to document each and every one of those precious moments this time.

Video version of the first episode of my journey

Background

So I actually have a lot of knowledge in Machine Learning already, since I took both the coursera ML course and deeplearning.ai, both taught by Andrew Ng. I implemented the projects in those courses, projects ranging from generating Jazz music with LSTM to generating artwork with neural style transfer. However, I never did the following altogether:

1. Gather the training data myself
2. Preprocess the data myself
3. Train the model and tuning it
4. Making it actually usable, like turning it into a GUI or website

Well, in my journey, I aim to create projects that will implement all 4 of the mentions above.

My Chosen Project

Anime GANs, more Neural Style Transfer, speech to text, damn! There are so many great projects out there. I decided to roll with a text to text neural machine translation project since I have had previous experience with it. And, google translate is missing a few features that a student like me taking Spanish would really need! There is nowhere to save the translated results and perhaps turn the results into a mini-quiz. So yeah, making a Spanish to English Translator GUI that can store results will be my next step :)