Xavier Geerinck | Posts

Getting started with Azure Functions

So I wanted to write a function for a customer that would trigger a bot. What I thought would be an easy process, turned out to be a lot of debugging and tuning to get everything working. Which is why I decided to write this post to help others get started with Azure Functions.

Xavier Geerinck

May 28, 20180 min read

coding dotnet

Getting started with DotNet Core

I wanted to get started with Machine Learning, but rather than using Tensorflow, I wanted to take a different approach and use ML.NET. Now you might ask yourself: "Why use .NET if you have something such as Tensorflow in Python?". Well, my preference goes towards languages containing brackets (C#, JS, ...) rather than having pure identations (Python), making me want to try .NET Core for this.

Xavier Geerinck

May 27, 20180 min read

ai ml rl

Bellman Equations

Summary

Xavier Geerinck

May 24, 20180 min read

ai ml rl

The Markov Property, Chain, Reward Process and Decision Process

As seen in the previous article, we now know the general concept of Reinforcement Learning. But how do we actually get towards solving our third challenge: "Temporal Credit Assignment"?

Xavier Geerinck

May 20, 20180 min read

algorithms

Ordinary Least Squares (OLS)

Let's start by defining the goal of our algorithm, what do we want to achieve with our OLS algorithm? Well if we have data points in a region (or XY-axis), then we want to be able to find an equation that fits as closely to these points as possible. We thus want to minimize the sum of the squared residuals. Just take a look at the picture below to see an illustration of this.

Xavier Geerinck

May 17, 20180 min read

coding javascript

Getting AMQP to work in your browser

For one of my customers, I had to be able to connect to an EventHub through the browser, so how did I do this? So we know that EventHub works with the AMQP protocol, so what if we could get this working in the frontend?

Xavier Geerinck

May 8, 20180 min read

ai ml rl

Installing OpenAI Gym in a Windows Environment

Reinforcement learning does not only requires a lot of knowledge about the subject to get started, it also requires a lot of tools to help you test your ideas. Since this process is quite lengthy and hard, OpenAI helped us with this. By creating something called the OpenAI Gym, they allow you to get started developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms in an easy to use way.

Xavier Geerinck

May 7, 20180 min read

ai ml rl

Multi-armed bandit framework

To start solving the problem of exploration, we are going to introduce the Multi-armed bandits framework. But what exactly does this solve? Just think that you are executing a clinical trial with 4 pills. You know that the pills have a survival rate but you don't know what that survival rate is. Your goal: find the pill with the highest chance of survival in X trials.

Xavier Geerinck

May 3, 20180 min read

infrastructure

Connect to your Docker Daemon through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Do you have Windows installed and you love using the Linux Subsystem on it? (commonly known as WSL) Well let me tell you the steps to achieve this.

Xavier Geerinck

May 1, 20180 min read

ai ml rl

An introduction to Reinforcement Learning (RL)

So as we learned in the intro to Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning is this technique where we have an agent who will take specific actions on an environment to try to reach an optimal state. But how can we illustrate this? Take a look at the following picture.

Xavier Geerinck

May 1, 20180 min read