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How to Label Data for Machine Learning

Ben Cook • Posted 2023-03-31

Machine learning has revolutionized the world of technology, playing a crucial role in various applications, from self-driving cars and facial recognition systems to language translation and sentiment analysis. The success of machine learning models largely depends on the quality and quantity of data they are trained on. In particular, labeled … Read more

Understanding the Data Science Process for Entrepreneurs

Ben Cook • Posted 2023-03-29

As an entrepreneur looking to harness the power of machine learning (ML) in your business, understanding the data science process is crucial. This process can be broken down into three main steps: The goal is to move through these stages as quickly as possible so that you can gather feedback … Read more

Saving Utility Companies Years with Computer Vision

Will Cook • Posted 2023-03-02

How do utility companies monitor thousands of miles of electrical wire to find small imperfections that threaten the entire system? For the entire history of electrical infrastructure, the only answer has been ‘very slowly.’ Now, Sparrow’s computer vision capabilities, combined with Fast Forward’s thermal imaging system, can accomplish what used … Read more

Speed Trap

Kaveen Jayamanna • Posted 2022-12-14

Overview This post is going to showcase the development of a vehicle speed detector using Sparrow Computing’s open-source libraries and PyTorch Lightning. The exciting news here is that we could make this speed detector for any traffic feed without prior knowledge about the site (no calibration required), or specialized imaging … Read more

TorchVision Datasets: Getting Started

Ben Cook • Posted 2021-10-22 • Code
torchvision datasets mnist 3

The TorchVision datasets subpackage is a convenient utility for accessing well-known public image and video datasets. You can use these tools to start training new computer vision models very quickly. TorchVision Datasets Example To get started, all you have to do is import one of the Dataset classes. Then, instantiate … Read more

NumPy Any: Understanding np.any()

Ben Cook • Posted 2021-10-21

The np.any() function tests whether any element in a NumPy array evaluates to true: The input can have any shape and the data type does not have to be boolean (as long as it’s truthy). If none of the elements evaluate to true, the function returns false: Passing in a … Read more

PyTorch DataLoader Quick Start

Ben Cook • Posted 2021-10-07 • Last updated 2021-10-18

PyTorch comes with powerful data loading capabilities out of the box. But with great power comes great responsibility and that makes data loading in PyTorch a fairly advanced topic. One of the best ways to learn advanced topics is to start with the happy path. Then add complexity when you … Read more

Poetry for Package Management in Machine Learning Projects

Ben Cook • Posted 2021-07-08 • Last updated 2021-10-20

When you’re building a production machine learning system, reproducibility is a proxy for the effectiveness of your development process. But without locking all your Python dependencies, your builds are not actually repeatable. If you work in a Python project without locking long enough, you will eventually get a broken build … Read more

Development containers in VS Code: a quick start guide

Ben Cook • Posted 2021-06-29 • Last updated 2022-09-07

If you’re building production ML systems, dev containers are the killer feature of VS Code. Dev containers give you full VS Code functionality inside a Docker container. This lets you unify your dev and production environments if production is a Docker container. But even if you’re not targeting a Docker … Read more