What does a machine learning model trained via supervised learning and a lion raised in captivity have in common? … They’re both likely to die in the wild! Now that might sound like a joke aimed at getting PETA to boycott my blog, but this is no laughing matter. Captive bred lions are more likely …
Read more “The Annotators Dilemma: When Humans Teach Machines to Fail”
Forgive me Stevie Wonder for slightly reordering your lyrics, but I think you’d agree that it’s hard to reach your highest ground without the help of teachers. Being a teacher is often a thankless job. Nobody gets rich or famous for being a teacher, yet the contribution teachers make to society is invaluable. So, in …
Read more “Teachers Keep on Teaching – ‘til I Reach my Highest Ground”
It’s hard to avoid the constant bickering about the results of our last election. Should mail-in voting be legal? Do we need stricter voter identification laws? Was there fraud in the last election? Did it impact the results? These are just a fraction of the questions circulating around elections and voter integrity these days. Sadly, …
Read more “Voting is Just a Precision and Recall Optimization Problem”
“Hey, our fledgling startup is on path to being the next *INSERT BIG TECH COMPANY NAME HERE* and we think you’re a great fit for our CTO role”. Find me a technical leader who hasn’t been enticed by those words and you’ll have found a liar. So, what happens when one succumbs to the temptation …
Read more ““If you start me up I’ll never stop …” Until We Successfully Exit”
“Sorry we don’t have enough resources, we only have four pairs” – As an engineering leader no other statement has made me cringe more. After all four pairs is a healthy sized team of eight developers. Throughout my career I have run across CTOs, VPs, directors, development managers, teams, and individual developers who swear by …
When I originally contemplated the subject of my next blog post, I thought it might be interesting to provide a thorough explanation of the latest and greatest speech recognition algorithms, often referred to as End-to-End Speech Recognition, Deep Speech, or Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). However, as I began to research the topic I quickly discovered …
Read more “End-to-End Speech Recognition: Part 1 – Neural Networks for Executives (I Mean Dummies)”
Just In case you couldn’t infer this from my previous posts some folks consider me opinionated and occasionally dogmatic. What else would you expect from a born and raised New Yorker, who grew up in a household where arguing your point was considered a cultural birthright! Unfortunately, while having strong opinions and ideas can be …
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Anyone who has worked in an agile organization has found that certain projects don’t quiet fit the agile mold. Nowhere is this more apparent than with research oriented projects. After all if there is complete uncertainty in the scope and outcome of a project, as would be the case in a research project, how do …
Read more “Managing Research Projects in an Agile Development Environment”
I apologize! That title was actually generated by Microsoft’s speech recognition system incorrectly transcribing “Microsoft’s 5.1% Word Error Rate (WER) Announcement is Completely Misleading”. Okay, that was snarky, but I promise Microsoft compelled me to write that. You see in the course of editing my previous post Microsoft had to go and put out a …
Read more “Microsoft’s 5.1% Word Error Rate (WER) Announcement is Complete and Utter Bullshit”