New Contest: Train All The Things

The old way was to write clever code that could handle every possible outcome. But what if you don’t know exactly what your inputs will look like, or just need a faster route to the final results? The answer is Machine Learning, and we want you to give it a try during the Train All the Things contest!

It’s hard to find a more buzz-worthy term than Artificial Intelligence. Right now, where the rubber hits the road in AI is Machine Learning and it’s never been so easy to get your feet wet in this realm.

From an 8-bit microcontroller to common single-board computers, you can do cool things like object recognition or color classification quite easily. Grab a beefier processor, dedicated ASIC, or lean heavily into the power of the cloud and you can do much more, like facial identification and gesture recognition. But the sky’s the limit. A big part of this contest is that we want everyone to get inspired by what you manage to pull off.

Yes, We Do Want to See Your ML “Hello World” Too!

Wait, wait, come back here. Have we already scared you off? Don’t read AI or ML and assume it’s not for you. We’ve included a category for “Artificial Intelligence Blinky” — your first attempt at doing something cool.

Need something simple to get you excited? How about Machine Learning on an ATtiny85 to sort Skittles candy by color? That uses just one color sensor for a quick and easy way to harvest data that forms a training set. But you could also climb up the ladder just a bit and make yourself a camera-based LEGO sorter or using an IMU in a magic wand to detect which spell you’re casting. Need more scientific inspiration? We’re hoping someday someone will build a training set that classifies microscope shots of micrometeorites. But we’d be equally excited with projects that tackle robot locomotion, natural language, and all the other wild ideas you can come up with.

Our guess is you don’t really need prizes to get excited about this one… most people have been itching for a reason to try out machine learning for quite some time. But we do have $100 Tindie gift certificates for the most interesting entry in each of the four contest categories: ML on the edge, ML on the gateway, AI blinky, and ML in the cloud.

Get started on your entry. The Train All The Things contest is sponsored by Digi-Key and runs until April 7th.

8 thoughts on “New Contest: Train All The Things

  1. Included in this week’s “The Embedded Muse”:

    Changing random stuff until your program works is “hacky” and “bad coding practice”.
    But if you do it fast enough it is “Machine learning” and pays 4x your current salary.

    1. +1 – and not only that – ‘works’ most of the time, without a clear explanation why when it does not. It has it’s places, but some applications seem a bit ridiculous. Why write deterministic logic that works all of the time, when we could have a black box that works most of the time?

  2. “The old way was to write clever code that could handle every possible outcome.”

    That ^^

    Imagine by RoGeorge Lemon
    ———–
    Imagine there’s no coding
    It isn’t hard to do
    No task to kill or test for
    And no debugging, too

    Imagine all programmers
    Leaving SCRAM in peace

    You, you may say I’m a dreamer
    But I’m now the only one
    Thinking nothing to program
    In thirty years from now

    Imagine your possessions
    I wonder if you can
    No jobs for the programmers
    A brotherhood of damn

    Imagine all programmers
    Sharing have no job

    You, you may say I’m a dreamer
    But I’m not the only one
    Without a Basic Income
    The world will burn as one

    :o)

  3. “Our guess is you don’t really need prizes to get excited about this one… most people have been itching for a reason to try out machine learning for quite some time.”

    Big boys use it on US. Might as well as use it on THEM.

    1. Good plan, you round up a billion dollars, I’ll train a neural net to identify sociopathic companies and apply massive negative feedback to small downward fluctuations in stock price…

  4. Wasn’t there recently an article on HaD about some friggin’ MIT punks who thought a funny “hello-world” AI project would be to recognize by photo whether a person’s gay, and its winding-up used in a court to hang folk?

    “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”
    should be a required label on every ML package/site. And, apparently it should require a certification/license in ethics.

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