AnswerIQ Technology

Joshua Bloom

Dr. Josh Bloom is co-founder, CTO, and Chairman of Wise.io — on a mission to help companies take better data-driven actions for customer success. Wise.io is hiring those with skills and talents across the full-stack and data-science workflow.
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Recent Posts

Five Takeaways on the State of Natural Language Processing

Thoughts following the 2015 "Text By The Bay" Conference

The first " Text By the Bay” conference, a new natural language processing (NLP) event from the “ Scala bythebay” organizers, just wrapped up tonight. In bringing together practitioners and theorists from academia and industry I’d call it a success, save one significant and glaring problem. 
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Topics: Machine Learning, Data Science, Conferences and Workshops, Predictive Analytics

Asking RNNs+LTSMs: What Would Mozart Write?

Preamble: A natural progression beyond artificial intelligence is artificial creativity. I've been interested in AC for awhile and started learning of the various criteria that the scholarly community has devised to test AC in art, music, writing, etc. (I think crosswords might present an interesting Turing-like test for AC). In music, a machine-generated score which is deemed interesting, challenging, and unique (and indistinguishable from the real work of a great master), would be a major accomplishment. Machine-generated music has a long history (cf. "Computer Models of Musical Creativity" by D. Cope; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

Deep Learning at the character level: With the resurgence of interest in Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), I thought it would be interesting to see how far we could go in autogenerating music. RNNs have actually been around in music generation for awhile (even with LSTM; see this site and this 2014 paper from Liu & Ramakrishnan and references therein), but we're now getting into an era where we can train on a big corpus and thus train a big, complex model. Andrej Karpathy's recent blog showed how training a character-level model on Shakespeare and Paul Graham essays could yield interesting, albeit fairly garbled, text that seems to mimic the flow and usage of

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Topics: Machine Learning, Data Science

Make Docker images Smaller with This Trick

The architectural and organizational/process advantages of containerization (eg., via Docker) are commonly known. However, in constructing images, especially those that serve as the base for other images, adding functionality via package installation is a double edged sword. On one hand we want our images to be most useful for the purposes they are built but—as images are downloaded, moved around our networks and live in our production environments—we pay a real speed and cost price for bloated image sizes. The obvious onus on image creators is to make them as practically small as possible without sacrificing efficicacy and extensibility. This blog shows how we shrunk our images with a pretty simple trick...

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Topics: Machine Learning, Data Science, Software Engineering