Author: Learning Machines

So, what is AI really?


One of the topics that is totally hyped at the moment is obviously Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. There are many self-proclaimed experts running around trying to sell you the stuff they have been doing all along under this new label.

When you ask them what AI means you will normally get some convoluted explanations (which is a good sign that they don’t get it themselves) and some “success stories”. The truth is that many of those talking heads don’t really know what they are talking about, yet happen to have a friend who knows somebody who picked up a book at the local station bookshop… ok, that was nasty but unfortunately often not too far away from the truth.

So, what is AI really? This post tries to give some guidance, so read on!
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Learning Data Science: Modelling Basics


Data Science is all about building good models, so let us start by building a very simple model: we want to predict monthly income from age (in a later post we will see that age is indeed a good predictor for income).
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Hash Me If You Can

We are living in the era of Big Data but the problem of course is that the bigger our data sets become the slower even simple search operations get. I will now show you a trick that is the next best thing to magic: building a search function that practically doesn’t slow down even for large data sets… in base R!
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Understanding the Maths of Computed Tomography (CT) scans


Noseman is having a headache and as an old-school hypochondriac he goes to see his doctor. His doctor is quite worried and makes an appointment with a radiologist for Noseman to get a CT scan.
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Clustering the Bible


During this time of year, there is obviously a lot of talk about the Bible. As most people know the New Testament comprises four different Gospels written by anonymous authors 40 to 70 years after Jesus’ supposed crucifixion.

Unfortunately, we have lost all of the originals but only retained copies of copies of copies (and so on) which date back hundreds of years after they were written in all kinds of different versions (renowned Biblical scholar Professor Bart Ehrmann states that there are more versions of the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament). Just as a fun fact: there are many more Gospels but only those four were included in the “official” Bible.
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Learning R: A Gentle Introduction to Higher-Order Functions


Have you ever thought about why the definition of a function in R is different from many other programming languages? The part that causes the biggest difficulties (especially for beginners of R) is that you state the name of the function at the beginning and use the assignment operator – as if functions were like any other data type, like vectors, matrices or data frames…
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