Editor's note: This is an overview of a multi-part tutorial on data science for newbies. The author has given the series a different -- tongue-in-cheek -- title; take it in stride and recognize that the series' approach and content is a fresh look at getting started with various aspects of data science from a software engineering perspective. To do some serious statistics with Python one should use a proper distribution like the one provided by Continuum Analytics. Of course, a manual installation of all the needed packages (Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib etc.) is possible but beware the complexities and convoluted package dependencies. The installation under Windows is straightforward but avoid the usage of multiple Python installations (for example, Python3 and Python2 in parallel).

That's because, to paraphrase Amazon's Jeff Bezos, artificial intelligence (AI) is "not just in the first inning of a long baseball game, but at the stage where the very first batter comes up." Look around, and you will find AI everywhere--in self driving cars, Siri on your phone, online customer support, movie recommendations on Netflix, fraud detection for your credit cards, etc. To be sure, there's more to come. Featuring 30 lectures, MIT's course "introduces students to the basic knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning methods of artificial intelligence." It includes interactive demonstrations designed to "help students gain intuition about how artificial intelligence methods work under a variety of circumstances."

Recently, I began a series on exploratory data analysis; so far, I have written about computing descriptive statistics and creating box plots in R for a univariate data set with missing values. Today, I will continue this series by analyzing the same data set with kernel density estimation, a useful non-parametric technique for visualizing the underlying distribution of a continuous variable.

Right now, Machine Learning and Data Science are two hot topics, the subject of many courses being offered at universities today. Above, you can watch a playlist of 18 lectures from a course called Learning From Data: A Machine Learning Course, taught by Caltech's Feynman Prize-winning professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa. This is an introductory course in machine learning (ML) that covers the basic theory, algorithms, and applications. ML is a key technology in Big Data, and in many financial, medical, commercial, and scientific applications. It enables computational systems to adaptively improve their performance with experience accumulated from the observed data.

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping your relationship with the world and it's just getting started. Tesla's autopilot, job automation, the products you'stumble upon' online - it's entering our daily lives, careers, businesses, even our homes with such blistering pace you probably haven't even realized it. There's a reason Andrew Ng, the founder of $100m company Coursera said "Artificial Intelligence is the new electricity" - soon it'll be as much a part of your daily life as your smartphone, except without the off button. But here's where things get really crazy. This time round, the revolution will see machines taking on tasks no human intellect could ever perform.

I put together an in-depth tutorial to explain Transforms (Data Augmentation), the Dataset class, and the DataLoader class in Pytorch. I also show a ton of use cases for different transforms applied on Grayscale and Color images, along with Segmentation datasets where the same transform should be applied to both the input and target images. I show how to do Affine transforms (rotation, translation, shear, zoom), some awesome Image-based transforms (saturation, brightness, contrast, gamma, grayscale). These transforms can be applied with pre-determined settings or randomly sampled from a range of values. I also show some cool utility transforms like type casting, converting to tensors, and going from CHW to HWC.

Today Hank explores artificial intelligence, including weak AI and strong AI, and the various ways that thinkers have tried to define strong AI including the Turing Test, and John Searle's response to the Turing Test, the Chinese Room. Hank also tries to figure out one of the more personally daunting questions yet: is his brother John a robot? Get your own Crash Course Philosophy mug from DFTBA: http://store.dftba.com/products/crash... The Latest from PBS Digital Studios: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... -- All other images and video either public domain or via VideoBlocks, or Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... -- Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: http://youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios Crash Course Philosophy is sponsored by Squarespace.

I've been working on a tutorial series for creating self-driving cars in Grand Theft Auto 5 for a bit now. The most recent creation is the result of day or so worth of collecting training data, and about 4 days of actual training of the model. It's currently a 30-layer convolutional neural network, it works purely on a frame-by-frame basis with no preprocessing other than an image resize and grayscale. It makes actions based on the current frame's pixel data, with no memory of what it's been doing. I plan to eventually incorporate some form of memory with something like recurrent layers, but...baby steps at a time!

It's a few years old, but still acts as a great technical introduction to the topic.

How To Create a Website in a Weekend! (Project-Centered Course) State University of New York via Coursera (3 ratings) 8th May, 2017