New York study group

gsg · October 24, 2018, 9:36pm

Indeed it was a great meeting! Thank you all for participating…
Now, let me ask each of you to share (here, in brief) one or more interesting things that you
heard at the Monday session.
We did not “take notes” of the round table, so it will be great if we can share here…

I recall a few things:

Soumith question to us about what are the patterns of development/use that we follow.
The (future?) support in Pytorch of “throw-away” part of the computation on the pass forward, and recompute it as needed in the backward pass, in order to release memory to enable bigger models.
There are only 2 DL frameworks with momentum today, TensorFlow and PyTorch.
How using an NVIDIA NVLink motherboard enables fast GPU-CPU memory exchanges by-passing PCI-e bandwidth bottleneck.

What other topics do you recall that we covered?

gsg · October 24, 2018, 9:42pm

henripal · October 24, 2018, 10:03pm

Other topics:

what’s next for pytorch: making jit-compiled code faster than eager code
no plans for extensions to other languages (a la swift for TF)

(Beginners: not to worry you’ll be fluent in all this stuff in no time )

danield · October 25, 2018, 12:29am

Separate to the performance topics and probably somewhat less popular, I was interested to hear about was Apache Arrows. As I use (and love) pandas an awful lot, I wouldn’t mind hearing more on arrows.

gsg · October 25, 2018, 3:26pm

Unfortunately, Monday night the space in Galvanize is taken by another group…
I can reserve it for either Tuesday 10/30 or Thursday 11/1 at 6:30PM …
Is there an easy way to conduct an online poll on your preferences?

Please post your reply as TUESDAY or THURSDAY…

prratek · October 25, 2018, 4:33pm

I vote TUESDAY

henripal · October 25, 2018, 4:45pm

Hi there! I can only make it Thursday.

iamgianluca · October 25, 2018, 5:51pm

I would rather meet on Thursday, so that we can all review the material of the lesson.

VarunT · October 26, 2018, 2:21am

THURSDAY
Yeah having a meet after class sounds good

danield · October 26, 2018, 3:37am

Either is fine for me.

rsr2425 · October 26, 2018, 10:26am

Thursday sounds like a good idea.

gsg · October 26, 2018, 10:44am

Early polling indicated a preference for Thursday, yet many have not yet indicated a preference…
Will close the poll at midnight tonight…

mechanyx · October 26, 2018, 1:56pm

I can make either but would prefer Thursday

gsg · October 27, 2018, 4:13pm

Thursday won, 5-1…
Now RSVP for Thursday at 6:30.
Please add your full name (if not listed) as I need to leave a list of attendees for security…

Next, we need an agenda… What topics would the attendees want to cover on Thursday?

I am working to recruit another “surprise guest” …

Cheers,
G

reshama · October 27, 2018, 5:31pm

Will you be attending the study group:

Date: Thursday, November 1
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Galvanize

If you have not yet, please complete whatever info you would like to share in fastai_Fall_2018_NYC_Group

At a minimum, please put in your First & Last names.

Yes
No
not sure

0 voters

prratek · October 27, 2018, 8:53pm

I think it would be nice to spend some time talking about project ideas.

reshama · October 27, 2018, 9:57pm

Hi all,
I am writing a blog and including a short paragraph with a couple of photos about week 1. Will share once it’s complete.

henripal · October 27, 2018, 11:50pm

+1 for project ideas.
Would add:

show your work: everyone who’s done something has the option to talk about it
Questions about the lesson(s) ?

reshama · October 28, 2018, 2:36pm

good ideas. can discuss any Kaggle competitions folks want to participate in.

pisymbol · October 29, 2018, 7:13pm

Where are you folks meeting again? Galvenize in SoHo? I’m in “Joisey” which is why I’m asking.