It is hard to believe that I only have 3 classes left to finish up my Masters. One elective (Power Electronics) and Project 1, 2. Going to stretch it out over 2024 and really try and present an impressive project as my capstone. I think this maybe where my university education ends.

So if you aren’t aware. I am now a YouTube star…

I am really proud of the work the team of students did. I was team lead and guided the team on creating a fairly extensive software suite for the Ghost Robotic’s dog. We only had about 9 weeks for the challenge and what we have presented is quite impressive. Android Application, ROS2 Node, Threat Detection in OpenCV and Python. It runs the gamut.

Will be up to the AFRL in 2024 to see if we build off this knowledge/team. Looking forward to the follow-up.

Python Again

So with all the hype in the world around AI and Deep Learning I finally decided to dig back in. I took Machine Learning in Fall of 2022, but this was very much the “old” machine learning. Meaning. Linear Algebra review, Support Vector Machines, etc. So I’ve enrolled in Andrew Ng’s Deep Learning Course: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning?

This is excellent course and I’m 2/5 of the way through it now. The first class is “easy” because I’m familiar with it a bit. But the second was quite the slog and I had to really study and take time. I’m going to take a few more weeks before I start on the convolutional neural networks and then I’m excited to get to sequence models. I don’t think it gets to the transformer architecture in this course, but it should be good platform to learn the new hotness (ChatGPT etc)

I’m trying to switch all programming projects that make sense to python. To keep everything straight. To give myself a refresher, as I’ve not done python really for serious projects since Python2. I’ve decided to enroll in ExecuteProgram.com’s python course which is quite good. Almost done with it: https://www.executeprogram.com/courses/python-for-programmers/lessons/wrapping-functions (edit: now done with it 12/29/2023 in perpetual review?)

Very impressed with the method Gary uses at Execute Program. Looking forward to the next class he will release which will deal more with classes and advanced python stuff.

That being said the current non-work programming task I’m working on is… https://devtalk.com/books/the-ray-tracer-challenge which I’m writing in python and hope to have some pictures rendering in 2024. Wish me luck.

Happy New Year!