Monthly Archives: October 2012

License to RHoK, Dec 1-2, Southampton, UK

Posted on by
4

After the great success and feedback of the previous global RHoK event in Southampton I decided to organize the next one as well. This time around kindly helped out by Alejandro Saucedo from HackaSoton.

During the weekend of 1-2 December 2012, The University of Southampton will be one of the satellite cities as part of the global Random Hacks of Kindness Event!

Like in June it looks like we will be the only UK event so let that be an extra motivation!

Click here for the detailed programme

Twitter hashtag: #rhoksoton

Eventbrite - RHoK Global December 2012: Southampton, UK

* Updates:

Continue reading →

Failing small: StackOverflow Machine Learning Competition

Posted on by
2

Last August every programmers’ faviorite site, StackExchange, announced a machine learning contest on Kaggle. The task was defined as:

…to find an algorithm that predicts whether (and for what reason) a question will be closed. The idea is simple: we’ve prepared a dataset with all the questions on Stack Overflow, including everything we knew about them right before they were posted, and whether they finally ended up closed or not.  You grab the data, build your brilliant classifier, run it against some leaderboard data and submit your results.  Rinse and repeat until the contest ends, when we’ll grab the most promising classifiers and run them against fresh data to choose winners.

Continue reading →

Diving into Data

Posted on by
4

Since about half a year my podcast subscriptions includes RCE-Cast, an interesting show run by very knowledgable hosts about HPC related topics. One of their more recent episodes was on the Datadive project by Datakind.

From the website:

DataKind brings together leading data scientists with high impact social organizations through a comprehensive, collaborative approach that leads to shared insights, greater understanding, and positive action through data in the service of humanity.

I liked the idea and, while I have plenty of scuba diving experience, data diving was not something I was very familiar with. The problems I have worked on so far have pretty much always been big CPU vs big data. Thus I followed their Twitter feed and signed up to the London event (first in the UK/Europe?) when I heard about it.

Continue reading →