A short story, excerpt from my book Fredric. Bob was a dragon. No, no, please don’t run away to seek cover. Bob was a very nice dragon: He helped little old ladies cross the street, he taught boy scouts how to light campfires, and from time to time he even…

Ensemble techniques — wherein a predictive model is composed of multiple (possibly) weaker models — are prevalent nowadays within the field of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL). Well-known methods such as bagging, boosting, and stacking are ML mainstays, widely (and fruitfully) deployed on a daily basis. Generally speaking…

In machine learning (ML), a hyperparameter is a parameter whose value is given by the user and used to control the learning process. This is in contrast to other parameters, whose values are obtained algorithmically via training. Hyperparameter tuning, or optimization, is often costly and software packages invariably provide hyperparameter…

A basic component of a deep neural network is the activation function (AF) — a non-linear function that shapes the final output of a node (“neuron”) in the network. Common activation functions include sigmoid, hyperbolic tangent (tanh), and rectified linear unit (ReLU).

The idea of boosting in machine learning is based on the question posed by Michael Kearns and Leslie Valiant in 1988/89: “Can a set of weak learners create a single strong learner?” In a seminal paper that came out a year later, “The strength of weak learnability”, Robert Schapire provided…

A short story, excerpt from my book Fredric. As Stewart was about to descend the final rung he heard a shout on the helmet radio: “Yee haw!” Which engendered the unfortunate consequence that the first words uttered by a human being on Mars were: “Who the hell was that?” Years…

Excerpt from my book, Xor: The Shape of Darkness.

A short story, excerpt from my book Fredric. Janet Cohen could tell the outcome as soon as she saw Dr. Barnaby Finch walk out the door. His ashen face spoke louder than words. “They rejected it, right?” she asked tremulously. “I’m so very sorry, Janet,” replied Dr. Finch in a…

A short story, excerpt from my book Fredric. Dr. Marvel Sky was the greatest computer scientist of his day. He had but a slight problem with his career in that his unique greatness was uniquely recognized by himself alone. …