With an iPhone Interface

Today after last night's storm it was hot and a bit sticky. The ground and plants had gotten a good soaking. The sky was clear with a bit of haze. The sun looked pale and almost white in the haze of the morning.

I'm back to my normal routine. I've finished seven of the ten comp sci (and related technical) courses I started back in May and June. I have three left to go, but I've half-completed all those. Nevertheless I'm shifting gears a bit. I'm doing one lecture a day from the remaining three, and adding in other activities, ones I doing on the trip, including a Machine Learning course (the one from Andrew Ng at Stanford).

Machine Learning is all the rage lately. It's fun getting a deep expertise in it, rapidly as I can process. In Ng's course I learned a new programming platform called Octave, which is what he said they use in Silicon Valley to prototype new algorithms, and only later port it over to Python or R for use in production. From the way everyone talks, you'd think it all happens in Python or R. You can tell Octave is for the gurus of the Valley.

I'm also making my way through a course on Udacity from a professor at Georgia Tech, about applications of Machine Learning to finance, specifically hedge fund trading algorithms. It's a really fascinating talk. One of the texts, which I already started reading, is about how hedge funds really work. It's fascinating. One can see how to apply machine learning algorithms to it quite easily, at least on conceptual level.

I texted Greg about this, telling him I was learning about hedge funds from a guy at Georgia Tech. Greg went to University of Georgia, and he's partisan about the state in general, and so I thought he would get a kick out of it, even though Georgia Tech is a rival to UGA.

He texted back, asked if I was going into investment banking. I laughed at that, and explained that it was about the machine learning algorithm behind it. I said I thought one could run any such sort of algorithm in the cloud at this point.

"With an iPhone interface. lol," I added.