In my continuous quest for self-improvement, I just finished reading Effective Debugging: 66 Specific Ways to Debug Software and Systems by Diomidis Spinellis. Debugging is a critical and under-appreciated skill. Building new features into software gets…
I recently finished reading The Bad Data Handbook: Cleaning Up The Data So You Can Get Back to Work by O’Reilly Publishing. This book is a collection of 18 essays about the art and science of…
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” is the single most important book I have read in my life. To call it life-changing is a grand understatement. In fact, most of its individual chapters qualify…
In building a cognitive model it can be difficult to know when it’s accurate enough. (You are measuring your daily performance, right?) We know that cognitive performance often involves making a tradeoff between the competing…
I’m a big fan of giving back. Here’s a talk I recently gave on why you should be a mentor. My mentoring experience I have personally been mentoring since 2008, when I became a mentor…
Machine Learning. Such a cool name, and such a powerful technology. But there’s a lot of work required on your part if you want to successfully apply it to your problems. Beware of these 5…
Thousands of families build a Pinewood Derby car every year. Hopefully this post helps another family who want to put a spoiler on their car! Step 1. It’s easiest to line up all the hole…
If you’ve built a cognitive system, you know that it requires a lot of training to reach peak performance. (For details, read Why does machine learning require so much data?) How much training data do you…
Introduction In my past posts, I showed both how to create a simple NLP model with rules and machine learning, and how to improve those same rules and machine learning NLP models. In this post…
Introduction In my last post, I introduced a simple Natural Language Processing (NLP) problem: extracting mentions of programming languages from the Wikipedia article on programming languages, using both a rules-based technique and a machine learning…