What’s up with weights and biases?

Thats a great question. You might also be wondering who we are and what this blog is all about? We’ll get there. But first, some introductions:

Ashish Malhotra (me): Studied Engineering at University of Toronto. Worked as a software engineering for a few years before co-founding Plex.ai.

Jovan Sardinha: Fellow engineer from University of Toronto and co-founder at Plex.ai.

At Plex.ai, we built Canada’s first insurance chatbot (Rover). We have been learning, experimenting and tinkering with machine learning ever since we did our first course in 2014.

What’s this blog about?

A big part of this field is about taking research ideas and building software systems that help achieve goals, especially in complex, uncertain environments. However, when Jovan and I started out, we found it quite challenging to implement the new ideas we learnt. We want to help you build you first artificially intelligent application or take part in your first Kaggle challenge as quick as possible. The sooner you see results the quicker you can learn and stay motivated.

This blog will try to address topics on the intersection of three fields as illustrated below:

Here are some of the things we will be covering in future posts:

• Setting up dev environment for ML
• Downloading large datasets
• Creating and saving ML models
• Tracking model performance metrics
• Predicting on new datasets and more

We love building things and hope you are excited to build something yourself. Oh and before we forget, why weights and biases you ask? It will become clear in a few posts 😀.