Following this guide, you only need to change a single line of code to train an object detection model to your own dataset. Story published here too.

Impatient? Skip to the Colab Notebook.

Object detection models are extremely powerful — from finding dogs in photos to improving healthcare, training computers to recognize which pixels constitute items unlocks near limitless potential. However, one of the biggest blockers keeping new applications from being built is adapting state-of-the-art, open source, and free resources to custom problems.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to prepare a custom dataset for object detection using tools…

I hired my friend to do my job better (again)

Want a tl;dr? Scroll to the bottom.

After selling my last company, Represently, it became clear that one of the biggest value adds we provided to the acquirer wasn’t just our technology or dedication to solving similar problems. It was our excitement to bring a fresh, data-driven product perspective to an existing product suite. What mountain of training data are we sitting on but not leveraging? How can we use recommendations to make our products easier to use? What data could be visualized more meaningfully to ensure our customers reached…

Nearly 2,000 hours later, and I still don’t consider myself a teacher. Rather, to me, “teaching” is a lively and constant show-and-tell of the unending potential data science unlocks.

That’s why I struggle to say goodbye to being a full-time educator.

I’ve been fortunate to be a part of the instructional staff for General Assembly’s Data Science Immersive for a little over a year, which is better measured by four 12-week, intense cohorts. While I started as a lowly night-time TA, an opportunity came for GA to trust me to lead the program. …

As spring arrives in Washington, D.C., we close the chapter on an abnormal winter in the District: For the first time in the last five years, the federal government did not declare a single full day closure due to snow.

D.C. had its federal snow day chances. On March 14, D.C. braced for Snowstorm Stella, which threatened six or more inches. Typically, such threats cause the all-powerful federal snow day authority Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to declare a closure. But OPM didn’t bite and only issued a three-hour delay with the option to work remotely. Even my office —…

Fake news is nearly an epidemic. Some argue it tipped the election (others disagree), Facebook has dedicated significant attention to minimize its spread, and viral misinformation has swayed financial markets.

But fake news hasn’t always been such a villain. Even deliberate fake news contains insightful commentary on current events and entertainment. Political satire, in particular, plays a powerful role in freedom of expression.