Neural Network Workshop

What: A hands-on workshop courtesy of the Machine Learning Group about Feedforward Neural Networks that includes some background and practical implementation.

When: January 26, 2011 7:00pm - 10:00pm

Why: To raise Neural Network Awareness (NNA) and money for Noisebridge. Donations towards Noisebridge will be encouraged and appreciated.

Where: In the back classroom

Who: Anyone who wants to participate, either come and learn or help teach. Join the mailing list!. It won't be too heavy on the math, so don't worry if you knowledge of vector spaces and derivatives is a bit of a null set...

Workshop Outline

• What is a neural net?
  • What does a real neural net in the brain look like?
  • Differences between artificial neural nets and biological neural nets
  • Basic architecture: layers of interconnected units
  • Weights and activation functions: the actual computation
• What can neural net do?
  • Universal Function Approximation
  • Classification: identifying classes of things
    • Binary classification vs. multi-class classification
  • Regression: predicting values from data
• How are neural nets trained?
  • Backpropagation
• Workshop Projects
  • Regression, Predicting Car MPG Based on 7 Variables
    • We'll use a neural net on this data.
  • Face or not a Face? Binary classification with neural nets.
    • Preprocessing images using OpenCV
    • Here we'll implement a neural network that detects whether an image contains a human face, using the language of your choice:
      • neuroph: java
      • FANN: C++
      • Encog: java
      • PyBrain: python
      • nnet R