Bootcamp - Investigations Conclude
in Metis on Reinforcement_learning
We’re all done with Investigations!
Alas. No more investigations. No more competing fancies to vie for our time.
True to form, the instructors held our feet to the fire and we did indeed wrap up all our Investigations before Lunch on Monday.
And, I was still the last one to present for whatever that’s worth.
This ended up being like a project presentation day because so many were presenting back-to-back. But it was a lot more relaxed and fun because we weren’t being evaluated.
Tiffany had given one on GraphX Friday. And Michael explored Time Series. Monday Alex did Dask. Amy did Spacey. Adam did… something I cannot quite describe in one word. It was a method of using a CNN to apply artistic styles to images. And I gave a presentation on reinforcement learning with a focus on bots playing games.
Adam and I both had sort of transitioned an idea or hope for the Passion Project into an investigation instead. I started hearing an odd phrase recently… “Business Applicability”. It has become expected that we take ideas to the instructors (David and Alice) and have them shot down for one reason or another, often due to things like too complex, too simple, inapplicable use of modeling assumptions, etc. But lately there seemed to be folk incorporating the Career Advisor (Ashley) into this discussion. I guess the discussions were someting like “yeah… that’s cool… but… what’s the business applicaton”. There are often ways to answer that question. Sometimes there is value in the method of approach overall even if the end goal has less direct applicability. But… things like weird picture generation or better AI bots for games… well… better to have fun with it as an Investgiation.
The really good thing about having everyone do investigations like this is that we all get more exposure to what’s out there. You can grab the work another student did whenever you need it. This saves you a bit of time you’d have spent wandering around the web exploring the topic.
For example, I could see myself using any of these investigations during Project Five:
- Dask
- GraphX
- Spacey
- Docker
- Isolation Forest