What is a horrible algorithmist really?

I came across this short post “I am a great programmer, but a horrible algorithmist“: “I do all the things a software craftsman does… I even have a degree in Computer Science from what I think is a great university. However, I feel I am a horrible algorithmist. Ask me to write a complex algorithm […]

Image Processing with Open Source Tools

My goal is to assemble an open source environment where I can prototype image processing algorithms in a fashion similar to Matlab. There’s two reasons for this. First, while Matlab is a great tool, it’s simply much too costly to obtain a commercial license for it. Especially in light of the fact that open source […]

“Is your optimization function correct?” Revisited

I think I have a cleaner way to explain Diagnosis Tip #2 in my post on diagnosing problems with your machine learning algorithm. Many machine learning solutions boil down to defining a model that is specified by some parameter $latex \theta$ and then creating an optimization function or error function $latex J( \theta )$ that […]