Santa's uncertain bags, New Year Resolutions and Scuba Diving | Weekly Report 21,22

10 Jan 2017 . category: report . Comments
#mumbai #data #travel #scuba

My bi-weekly report from the 26th of December to the 9th of January – a fun couple of weeks going into 2017!

Work on the Christmas Competition from Kaggle is underway. I’ve set out with a Genetic Algorithm, partly because I was a little familiar with it, and I wanted to see the evolution in code!

I first got the framework for training and validating ready, thanks to many helpful kernels. My algorithm randomizes “number of toys of each kind” initially, and improves that combination over iterations((by crossovers and mutation). This ensures the boundary conditions of minimum 3 toys, and maximum 50 pounds. I’ve since hopped on to different strategies, currently working on “Dynamic max_toys” – generate different optimal combinations for different sets(of say, 100 toys). Lagging behind on the leaderboard, more thought is required!

I took up on my stranded learning project – Generative neural nets! Revised RNNs and backpropogation, and got a character-rnn generator working for lyrics generation(“lyrnn”). I wasn’t very impressed with the results, the hyperparameters are tough to tune! I came across an awesome project on Story generation via images, which used skip-thought vectors(along the lines of word2vec). Still studying, will be working on it soon!

I also wrote a New Year blog – “2016 was great 2017 will be better!”, put it out on facebook. A lot was written, time to do!

Third day into the new year, I went on a 2-day trip with my college friends, to Malvan, a fishing town near Goa. A beautiful place if you’re into water sports – Scuba Diving, Parasailing, you name it! It was fun, i love travelling! Got duped by a bus agent on the way back from Kolhapur, we were forced to vacate our illegal seats in Pune. Resulted in a fun(?) 3-hour post-midnight adventure with Jeet, reached Bombay by morning!

The running schedule is on target, put in a solid 10K at 5:06 today. I’ve also began training for better core/arm strength. Wrote a motivational article for BITS Run, it was fun!

I’m moving to Bangalore day after, next six months in Belong. Spent quite some time house-hunting – it is truly tiring. Logistics being handled, exciting days ahead!

That’s it folks. Till next time!

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