WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

A curated list of awesome Deep Learning tutorials, projects and communities.

This guide is for anyone who is curious about machine learning but has no idea where to start. I imagine there are a lot of people who tried reading the wikipedia article, got frustrated and gave up wishing someone would just give them a high-level explanation. That’s what this is. The goal is be accessible to anyone — which means that there’s a lot of generalizations. But who cares? If this gets anyone more interested in ML, then mission accomplished.

Creating and maintaining a platform for reliably producing and deploying machine learning models requires careful orchestration of many components—-a learner for generating models based on training data, modules for analyzing and validating both data as well as models, and finally infrastructure for serving models in production. This becomes particularly challenging when data changes over time and fresh models need to be produced continuously. Unfortunately, such orchestration is often done ad hoc using glue code and custom scripts developed by individual teams for specific use cases, leading to duplicated effort and fragile systems with high technical debt. We present the anatomy of a general-purpose machine learning platform and one implementation of such a platform at Google. By integrating the aforementioned components into one platform, we were able to standardize the components, simplify the platform configuration, and reduce the time to production from the order of months to weeks, while providing platform stability that minimizes service disruptions. We present the case study of one deployment of the platform in the Google Play app store, where the machine learning models are refreshed continuously as new data arrive. Deploying the platform led to reduced custom code, faster experiment cycles, and a 2% increase in app installs resulting from improved data and model analysis.

Maybe you’ve downloaded TensorFlow and you’re ready to get started with some deep learning?

But then you wonder: What the hell is a tensor?

Perhaps you looked it up on Wikipedia and now you’re more confused than ever. Maybe you found this NASA tutorial and still have no idea what it’s talking about?

The problem is most guides talk about tensors as if you already understand all the terms they’re using to describe the math. Have no fear! I hated math as a kid, so if I can figure it out, you can too! We just have to explain everything in simpler terms.

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts that is designed to get you quickly up to speed with deep learning; from first principles, all the way to discussions of some of the intricate details, with the purposes of achieving respectable performance on two established machine learning benchmarks: MNIST (classification of handwritten digits) and CIFAR-10 (classification of small images across 10 distinct classes—airplane, automobile, bird, cat, deer, dog, frog, horse, ship & truck).