PechaKucha Night & Multidisciplinary Symposium on Reinforcement Learning

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, June 20th, 2009

I gave my talk at PechaKucha night a few days ago. It feels much shorter than 6:40 when you get up there! There was about 300 people, I presented first

I just want to show some pictures of the set up:

It’s really cool. There’s an area there that is separated from the other lounge areas by a curtain. In this area there’s 3 screens. Now, the 3 screens are extremely handy when you’re presenting because you don’t have to turn around completely to know that the slide changed. Also, when you’re looking at the presentation, for some reason it makes it feel more 3D when you see the slides from different angles. Pretty spectacular!

This is what one of the lounge areas looked like:

As you can also see by the screen, this was the 2 year anniversary! Woohoo!

It is also worth noting the efforts I went to to make sure I knew what I was talking about. I practiced an insane amount of times, and I even made an app that shows my slide notes, and I can just swipe through them. (Though, when I got there and decided to look at it, the app crashed just about at slide 10. LOL) But, when I got up there, I completely winged it. The key points were the same, but I have absolutely no recollection of what I said, exactly.

So yeah, PechaKucha was really fun, and the people there were amazing.

Oh yeah: My dad was going to record it so that I could share it with yall, but I forgot the batteries. ROFL! I know right, a roboticist forgot the batteries. Total shame!

The next day I went to McGill for this Multidisciplinary Symposium on Reinforcement Learning.

I had to sit on the floor because there were not enough chairs. I also found the general attitude of some of the presenters was ‘my way, or the highway’.

With that being said, it was all worth it in order to listen to Andrew Ng’s talk (Ng doesn’t have the attitude of ‘my way or the highway’). He was most definitely the only person there that had a great in-depth and practical knowledge of what RL is all about. He was leaps beyond many of the other presenters.

It’s funny though because it felt like the other presenters (who thought that they were all the key to the earth), thought that Ng was using the wrong principles, not RL, in his Little Dog algorithms. They didn’t catch on what it was all about. I lol at them!

In any case, I didn’t go back the next day because I figured I could learn more online and do some of my own research, where I would be learning more.

I like AI & ML more than RL. To me, RL is just AI + ML but in a loop. Long live AI & ML!

Posted in: Art, Other, Projects, School.
Tags: andrew ng, MSRL, PechaKucha, PK, reinforcement learning, RL

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