MLS is Back tonight The regular season begins in earnest as Inter Miami CF host Real Salt Lake. <strong>Kickoff</strong> is set for 8 pm ET on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV. CCC continues New England Revolution face CA Independiente and Orlando City SC travel to Cavalry FC as 2024

Your Wednesday Kickoff: The 2024 MLS season kicks off tonight! | MLSSoccer.com

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, a financial media company, is gearing up to honor innovation in the financial services sector. Its flagship conferences, including the and , will kick off at New York City’s on November 13. Benzinga Fintech Deal Day & Awards Future of Digital Assets Convene 225 The two days of events will bring together 1,000 founders, operators, and investors to share the latest trends and opportunities in fintech and digital assets. Confirmed speakers include leading executives from industry titans such as BlackRock, DTCC, OCC, State Street, Société Générale, Hedera, Citi, BMO Capital Markets, Northern Trust, Citibank, Amazon, S&P Global, Google, Fireblocks, Invesco, and Moody’s. “This is where the future of fintech will be shaped,” Benzinga Founder, CEO Jason Raznick said. “If you're not here, you're likely to miss out on upwards of $100 million in deals made. This is where deals get done.” Other reasons to not miss Benzinga’s Fintech Deal Day & Awards include: Executive Access: Engage with executives at top-tier companies like Robinhood and State Street through rapid-fire discussions and speed networking. Keynote Surprise: Meet celebrity “shark” investor Kevin O’Leary, from ABC Network’s Shark Tank. O’Leary will offer sharp insight into the world of fintech investing, as well as his candid thoughts. Benzinga Connect: Ideate and deal with over 1,000 founders, operators, and investors attending with Benzinga’s networking app. Receive key updates, book 1:1 meetings, and review the agenda, speakers, sponsors, and participating companies. Innovation Showcase: Stroll the exhibit halls for live demos and presentations before joining attendees in the afternoon to celebrate innovators who have made a significant contribution to the trajectory of the fintech industry. A limited number of tickets remain available; the clock is ticking, and seats are filling up fast. This is the one event in 2023 that you can't afford to miss. Secure a spot and be a part of the thought leadership that guides tomorrow's innovation in financial services. Book Now! Benzinga’s Fintech Deal Day & Awards | November 13, 2023 | Convene in NYC Use code HACKERNOON20 for 20% off tickets. . Get tickets here

Benzinga Kick Off Flagship Conferences Recognizing and Fueling Innovation In Finance

I want to welcome you to ! This guide will walk you through setting up a fully functional libp2p node, so that you can take control of the spacecraft 🚀 from that point on and build your application. libp2p Background P2P based systems and applications have been around for several decades now. Such projects have well known challenges and difficulties that need to be addressed regarding their networking layer. Over the years, new projects have implemented p2p networking primitives again and again. These projects usually had their networking layer tight with the application layer and were not open source. Moreover, some projects did not even reach the application layer development as a consequence of all the networking challenges that needed to be solved before getting into it. All things considered, during these decades the available projects did not contribute to a rapid growth of the p2p ecosystem. One of the primary goals of libp2p is to fill this gap by enabling application and system developers to focus on their use cases and business logic while relying on a composable networking stack. What is libp2p? Libp2p is a composable and modular networking stack, which was designed to be able to become the networking layer of any type of p2p system. Its modular nature is the key to enable such a variety of projects, while also being upgradable for future network requirements. Understanding where libp2p fits is important to understand how it is designed and how it can be used. Different p2p systems have different needs and requirements, while they might run in different environments and have different hardware capabilities. Considerations before starting Before you start with libp2p, it is important to understand what environments you expect your application to run on. Nowadays, you can run JavaScript code in several different environments, some of them with their own particularities. While the libp2p core codebase aims to work in multiple environments, there are some limitations that are not possible to overcome at the time of writing. As an example, browsers do not support listening for connections via WebSockets, but only to dial known addresses, as they are designed for the traditional client-server model. As a consequence of these limitations, some environments will require to think about a network topology and additional infrastructure as a way to achieve connectivity, as well as to provide a smoother experience to the end user. There is a wide variety of libp2p modules available to plug in, as well as different ways to configure each one. Libp2p empowers the application layer to select the modules they need and nothing else. This flexibility aims to fulfil every network requirement, environment constraints and hardware capabilities. Create your libp2p node with js-libp2p It is usually recommended to start with a base configuration of libp2p and build upon it, specially for new users that are not entirely familiar with every single piece of the libp2p stack. The most important documents to have handy are the and the . The former is divided into two main parts, one for creating a libp2p node and one to interact with it, while the latter is focused on configuring each type of libp2p module. The configuration of libp2p is a key part of its structure. Each project should go through what libp2p can offer and select what is important for them. Regardless of how it is configured, its top level API will always be the same. API documentation Configuration documentation The first step is to install libp2p in your project with your favourite JavaScript Package Manager. In this guide, we will configure the libp2p node in several stages, as this can make troubleshooting configuration issues much easier. It is important to specify that the following content is based on as the way libp2p is configured might change in upcoming releases. libp2p@0.29 Basic setup With libp2p installed, let’s configure the absolute minimum needed to get your node running. The only modules libp2p requires are a and a module. Moreover, it is highly recommended that a basic setup should also have a configured. The create options can be checked in the . Transport Crypto Stream Multiplexer API.md#create Transport Libp2p uses Transports to establish connections between peers over the network. You can configure one Transport, or as many as you like. Supporting more Transports will improve the ability for other nodes on the network to communicate with you. You should select Transports according to the runtime where your application will run. You can see a of some of the available Transports. As an example, in a browser environment and are typically installed. list libp2p-websockets libp2p-webrtc-star If you need a transport that is not available in the ecosystem, you can easily create your own. The only requirement of a libp2p transport is to be compliant with the . transport interface Crypto In a p2p context, encryption is an essential component for the communication on the libp2p network. Every connection is required to be encrypted to ensure security for everyone. is the to use at the moment. is being but other encryption modules might appear soon. libp2p-noise recommended module libp2p-secio deprecated If you want to use your own connection encryption module, you just need to guarantee that it is compliant with the . crypto interface Multiplexers Multiplexers are not required by libp2p, but they are super important for the efficiency of the connections using several protocols that libp2p will run. It allows libp2p to run several of its internal protocols, like Identify, as well as allow your application to easily run any number of protocols over a single connection. Running libp2p With a Transport, Crypto and Stream Multiplexer modules specified, you can your libp2p node. However, you also need to specify its listening addresses, so that your transports can listen for connections from other peers. Otherwise, your node will be a peer. start “dial only” This will work perfectly in a Node.js environment, but it will not start in a browser context. The listen multiaddr aims to listen for new websocket connections on the local port. As previously stated, browsers do not support listening for connections. As a result, this type of multiaddr should not be used if your application will run in a browser environment. However, you can still use the websockets transport to dial other peers that can listen for websocket connections. /ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/8000/ws 8000 The described issue is one of the main reasons to have transport. The other multiaddr aims to listen on a different machine that can listen for new connections. The star server on will listen for new connections and relay them to the appropriate peer. More than listening from connection on behalf of other peers, the star server acts as a peer discovery mechanism and informs the connected peers once a new peer joins. Bear in mind that this is a public available star server and its availability is not guaranteed. You should your own for production.You can check the complete libp2p-webrtc-star /dns4/wrtc-star1.par.dwebops.pub/tcp/443/wss/p2p-webrtc-star wrtc-star1.par.dwebops.pub setup API documentation You can check the complete to understand what you can do with your node from now on. API documentation Customize your js-libp2p node Now that you can have connectivity with other nodes in the network, it is time to select the modules that you need for your application, as well as to tune the node according to your needs. There are several other modules that can be added, in order to fulfil the needs of a p2p application. These include Peer Discovery, Pubsub, Content Routing and Peer Routing, among others. Bear in mind that you should only add the modules you need. Peer Discovery One of the most important characteristics of a typical p2p application is its ability to find other peers on the network. Libp2p provides discovery protocols. Some of them are also dependent of the runtime of the node, like , which is not supported in a web browser. several libp2p-mdns You can also specify your configuration for each peer discovery module you provide. It is also important to point out that transports with built in peer discovery capabilities (e.g ) are automatically added as discovery modules (but can be disabled). libp2p-webrtc-star With Peer Discovery modules added, libp2p will handle everything and add the discovered peers to its Peer Store. Pubsub Some applications will potentially need a pubsub message service for real-time communication. There are available, but is the recommended router to use thanks to its efficiency and security measures. Once you have a pubsub router in your node, you are able to use the , where the most common methods are and . two pubsub routers libp2p-gossipsub Pubsub API Methods subscribe publish Content and Peer Routing offers a way to find where content lives on the network, while provides a mechanism to find other peers on the network by making queries. There are currently two implementations for each of these, the (Distributed Hash Table) which provides both content and peer routing, and one implementation for content routing and one for peer routing. The delegate routers aim to leverage more capable nodes to issue DHT queries on behalf of the requesting peer. It is common to leverage nodes for this purpose. Content routing Peer Routing DHT delegate router go-ipfs You can have multiple routers, as well as the DHT at the same time. If that is the case, libp2p will start by trying the DHT. If it is not successful, it will try each router until it succeeds. It is important pointing out that peers with less capabilities are recommended to use the DHT. not Create your own protocol So far, we went through the basics for building a regular p2p app. We may decide which modules to use according to our needs, or even create new ones. But, libp2p also allows the creation of new protocols. Libp2p is a , where custom protocols operate in a similar fashion as a RESTful API. Each protocol has an identifier and a handler. As an example, uses the protocol on top of libp2p for custom data exchange between peers. “modular system of protocols” IPFS ipfs-bitswap After you have your custom protocol, you just need to hook it into libp2p. The will listen for stream messages under the protocol and call the provided handler. handle What is next? Once you have your networking building blocks ready to be used by your app, you can start focusing on it! 🎉 But before going into production, you should setup your own infrastructure. The code examples here use public infrastructure provided by Protocol Labs for experimenting, but they are not meant to be used in production and their availability is not guaranteed. According to your requirements and used modules, you might need to setup webrtc-star servers, delegate routers, or even circuit relay nodes. There are a few new features expected for the upcoming libp2p releases that will help with some of the pain points covered here regarding connectivity and discoverability. Stay tuned and let’s distribute the web together! ❤️ At MOXY we’ve been contributing to libp2p and also leveraging it to deliver distributed applications, namely and , among a few others underway. If you are looking for help with a project that could benefit from p2p capabilities, . MOXY has been working on several projects on top of libp2p, namely Nomios Discussify tell us a bit more Nomios If you have any question, issue, or even new ideas with , you are welcome to reach out to me directly on , create a topic in the libp2p or open Github issues in any . libp2p Twitter discussion forum libp2p repo Written by Vasco Santos

Kickoff Your Application With js-libp2p

So You Want to Get Into Data Science Congratulations! Data Science is a career that’s hottest, hardest, most challenging, most rewarding, and full of top-notch minds. Your journey is bound to be full of fun, challenges, enlightenment, and achievements (big or small). New papers are published daily or even hourly. New techniques and experiments are developed regularly. New ways of thinking become the new norm. And what seems magical before, are proven feasible. But You Don’t Know Where to Start But getting into Data Science is not easy. Far from it. The learning curve is brutal. There is so much to learn: Linear Algebra, Calculus, Statistics, Python, SQL, Machine Learning, Algorithm, Optimization, Data Wrangling, Data Visualization, Software Engineering, DevOps, … The list goes on and on. Some people may have some background in math or statistics, which will definitely help. Yet you still need a solid foundation for software engineering to be efficient and be successful in your career. But this is not a problem, you say. After all, we live in an era of booming online education. There are plenty of courses paid and free we can choose. . The biggest challenge for self-education these days is not lack of education resources, but hard to find the best or most relevant ones. True, but this is precisely where the problem is Enter CS50. If You are Only Allowed to Take One CS Course, Take CS50. What is CS50? It is the introductory course on taught at by . It is the largest class at Harvard with 800 students, 102 staff, and a professional production team. It offers both an on-campus and an online course. I’ve taken the online one, but it’s already best computer science course I came across, period. Let me tell you why: computer science Harvard University Professor David J. Malan THE The learning curve is so well designed, and it’s like watching a great suspense movie The CS50 staff has the capability of knowing precisely what you do and do not know before each lecture (in that they have zero ). So the speech will not mention anything you are not familiar with. It smoothly guides you through key concepts of computer science and makes it seem obvious. It raises questions from time to time and later addresses them with a more in-depth explanation of the concepts. You’ll have plenty of ‘a-ha’ moments, and it almost felt like watching a suspense movie. expert blindness Covers core and essential fundamentals of computer science, and leave plenty of room for you to dig deeper The course covers most of the critical computer science elements: C, Python, Data Structures, Algorithms, Software Engineering, Resource Management, Web Development, etc. It delves down deep enough so you can understand all the essential concepts while also know where to look if you want to dig deeper. Orchestrate variety of ways to teach you challenging/boring concept, never felt boring CS50 has many ways to teach and keep you engaged. You’ll play a game to understand different sorting algorithms, receive a rubber duck to experience the famous , watch experiments of ‘array of lights 🚥’ to learn data structure, even eat a delicious breakfast 🍞 while exploring the idea of pseudo-code. (One of my favorites is where David J. Malan uses a Yellow-page phone book to explain binary search and tears down half of the book and throw it away. A definitive moment in CS50 indeed. ) Rubber Duck Debugging Interactive, fun and engaging, the time just flew by, and you’ll be amazed what you can do once the course is over The learning experience is so fun you’ll feel the time fly by without noticing it. Some of the problem set it gives are quite challenging, yet not impossible. And you’ll feel so proud of yourself once you cracked it. You’ll probably fall in love with the joy of problem-solving. If you are stuck, there is an online community on almost every social network platform (Twitter, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Facebook, etc.) where you can get help. Out-of-class activities get you familiar with the ‘developer culture,’ which is essential for your future career. Puzzle days, office hours, CS 50 Fairs, the final project ‘All-nighter’ hackathon (free breakfast at IHOP if you stay up all night), lots of activities designed to get you familiar with the ‘developer culture’ and better prepare you for the software engineering world. State-of-the-art course software to get you started How great is a computer science course if they don’t use the software tools they developed themselves? Over the years, CS50’s staff has developed a series of tools/software to help the students , , , , and even ! These are all neat and useful ‘ ’ as David J. Malan puts it and will help you get up to speed. write code submit homework check their code quality/syntax tidy up code styles generate color-coded code documentation in PDF form training-wheels And It Is Great for Data Science Too Being a great course, CS50 is also very to Data Science. It helps you lay a solid foundation of software engineering for your future career: relevant It teaches you C. More importantly, through C, you understand the fundamentals of computer like how memory works, what is a pointer, data structures, etc .If you can write C, then you can quickly learn to write in C++. C++ is the de facto low-level, high-performance language used for data science libraries like Numpy, Pandas, Sk-Learn, etc. It teaches Python, which is the primary high-level language for Machine Learning and Data Science. It teaches SQL, which is the most widely used language in Data Science. It also teaches web programming, useful when you try to deploy your model to production. So essentially nothing taught in the course is not somewhat useful to you, and the foundation it helps you build will go a long way. CS50 and Beyond! Once you finished the course, you’ll be more knowledgeable and confident to continue your Data Science journey, and I’ll point you to a couple of possible directions from here: CS50’s Web Programming with Python and JavaScript Teaches you the most relevant and progressive web programming tools like CSS, Javascripts, React, Flask/Django, by the talented TF . Link . Brian Yu here Jeremy Howard ’s Fast.ai course to Start a ‘Top-down’ Approach for ML is fantastic and unique. It enables you to build state-of-the-art deep learning models within the first lesson with less than ten lines of code. Then it delves down deeper and deeper on the how and why. The only prerequisite is one-year of coding experience, which CS50 would have already prepared you with. Fast.ai Andrew Ng ’s Machine Learning Course at Coursera , but a ‘Bottom-up’ style. It smoothly explains the math fundamentals first and gradually builds up the knowledge to piece together complicated machine learning models from scratch. I have that explains the difference between and ’s different approaches to machine learning education and recommend a potentially efficient way to learn. Another great Machine Learning course an article Andrew Ng Jeremy Howard Corey Schafer’s YouTube channel, Python and OOP Tutorials As good as it is, CS50 only covers the generic and basic concepts of Python. You’ll need more in-depth knowledge to code efficiently for your data science projects. For this, I recommend . He is one of the best Python educators I came across to explain complicated ideas in a crystal clear way. Not one second of his videos is wasted. The content is concise, to the point, and highly condensed. He has playlists for basic , , , , and . Corey Schafer’s YouTube channel Python SQL Matplotlib Git Object-Oriented Programming Conclusion Learning Data Science is never a breeze, and I hope this article will help a little in alleviating the pain and make your journey a bit more efficient and fun. If you know other courses and resources that are also great, please feel free to leave a response so others can also see. Thanks! Found this article useful? Follow me ( ) on Medium or you can find me on Twitter or my blog site . You could also check out my most popular articles below! Please 👏 this article to share it! Michael Li @lymenlee wayofnumbers.com Two Sides of the Same Coin: Jeremy Howard’s fast.ai vs Andrew Ng’s deeplearning.ai I finished Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning Course and I Felt Great!

A Pleasant Way to Kick Off Your Data Science Education- This is CS50

150 Top Rated Programming Courses To Kickoff 2019

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It’s the right way to do things. — Linus Torwalds This article can be used as a tutorial to start contribution. It contains the content that was used in one of my webinars, “KickOff To Open Source”. The webinar was based on how to start open source contributions, and it covered the basics of and GitHub. You can see the presentation at . There will be more webinars, meetups and tutorial videos and articles soon, to get notified directly in your email, . open source Git http://madhavbahl.tech/opensource/ subscribe here Why Open Source? After hearing “open source”, the first thing that comes to our mind is free software, isn’t it? Most of the people are business minded and go for profit, but open source is free right? Still, there is a huge community of open source developers out there, and there are countless awesome reasons behind this. Open source is in your best interest, whether you are an individual, an organisation, a small business, or a non-profit organisation. There are many reasons you should start an open source project, or start open source contributions as an individual. Some of the reasons I like the most are: People from all over the world can contribute to your code A very good code quality is maintained Reduces duplication of effort (you can put licenses to your repositories) Showcase your talent and competence And the reason I love open source, Lift the community (Always remember, “ ”) we rise by lifting others Simple Words… Each and every project you can find on GitHub (of course which is not private) is an open source project. to make contribution, you just need to find a project that suits you, and an issue to work upon. Therefore, Open Source is 💚 Yes, and I am happy spreading this feeling of love. More you contribute, more awareness and ideas you get! Doing projects in collab with some super awesome people You meet like minded people, and expand your network Cant fix a bug!? Ask Help Any Prerequisite Knowledge? Generally people have a mindset that they need to be very expert in every (or any one) domain to start open source contributions. This is WRONG! Even if you are a beginner and you have a basic knowledge of Git and GitHub, you can start contributing. Photo taken from https://www.wired.com/2013/03/github/ Before proceeding further, I highly suggest that you should have a basic knowledge of Git and GitHub. If you are new to this you can read my 2 part tutorial series on the same: GIT-Good Part-A: Hello GitHub _This is a two part series on GIT and GitHub, → GIT-Good Part-A: Hello GitHub  GIT-Good Part-B: In Git we trust! You…_codeburst.io GIT Good: A Practical Introduction to GIT and GitHub (Hello GitHub) GIT-Good Part-B: In Git we trust! _This is a two part series on GIT and GitHub,GIT-Good Part-A: Hello GitHub  → GIT-Good Part-B: In Git we trust! You…_codeburst.io GIT Good: A Practical Introduction to GIT and GitHub (In GIT we trust!) After reading these two articles, you can watch this YouTube video to have a great insight on Git commands. Ready! Set! Go! Follow these 6 basic steps and make your first open source contribution in 2 minutes. STEP 1: Find Your Project First step for starting open source is obviously, finding an open source project to contribute to! Either you can go for contributing the project os some open source organisation like fossasia etc. Or, you can find your projects/issues you want ot work on from these websites. — A website which helps you find projects/issues based on your required language or issue labels. issuehub.io — Another useful tool for searching issues Code Triage — List of projects with issues that can be resolved by beginners Up For Grabs — A list of issues that are labelled “first-timers-only”. First Timers Only — A list of awesome beginners-friendly projects. Awesome First Timers PR Although you can find projects to contribute to from the above mentioned resources, it is better to find any open source organisation and start contributing to their projects. You can find some good open source organisations . here Also, you can find some good organisations whose projects were selected for GSoC this year and start contributing to their projects. _Edit description_summerofcode.withgoogle.com Google Summer of Code To Follow The Next Steps You Can Make Your First Open Source Contribution In This Practise Repository: https://github.com/Logic-Xcution/Kickoff-To-Open-Source _Kickoff-To-Open-Source - Guide for your first open source contribution!_github.com Logic-Xcution/Kickoff-To-Open-Source Once you have found the project which you want to contribute to, follow these 5 simple steps. STEP 2: Fork The Repository Fork this repo by clicking on the fork button on the top of the page. This will create a copy of this repository in your account. STEP 3: Clone The Repository Clone the repo to your machine. Go to your GitHub account, click on the clone button and then click the copy to clipboard icon. Open a terminal and run the following git command: git clone "Copied URL" STEP 4: Create a Branch Go to the directory where you cloned the repo.Create a new branch using command git checkout git checkout -b <branch-name> for keeping a standard, let’s have the name of branch as username for example: git checkout -b MadhavBahlMD STEP 5: Make Changes! Resolve Issue! Commit Those Changes! Push To GitHub! Make the necessary changes, commit and push your code to GitHub. Here, we are adding our username, name and bio in the CONTRIBUTORS.md To make commit and push changes, git add .git commit -m "Add [username] as a contributor"git push origin <branch name> STEP 6: Open a Pull Request If you go to your repository on GitHub, you’ll see a button. Click on that button and submit the pull request! Compare & pull request Soon your changes will be reviewed and the PR will be merged if the changes are legit! As Simple As That! Congrats, You just made your first PR.Welcome to the world of open source. STEP 7 (Optional): Keeping your fork synced with original repository First of all, switch to the master branch, master branch is the main working branch which is supposed to have most updated code! git checkout master Now, add original repo’s url as a new remote, say original git remote add original git@github.com:Logic-Xcution/Kickoff-To-Open-Source.git This is a way of telling git that another version of this project exists in the specified url and we’re calling it . Once the changes are merged, fetch the new version of original repository. original git fetch original Now, you need to merge the new revision of my repository into your master branch. git rebase original/master Now you can push these changes to your GitHub repo: git push origin master Also, since your changes are merged and your repo is updated, the branch you created for your contribution is no longer required and you can delete it! git branch -d <brach-name> git push origin --delete <branch-name> By following this step 7, you can make sure that your copy of the project is same as the original project to avoid any conflicts in future. That’s it Found the article helpful? _A Cadet Who Codes | A guide, teacher and mentor for those who want to learn programming and development, subscribe to be the first one to hear from me._http://madhavbahl.tech TheLeanProgrammer | Subscribe Subscribe to TheLeanProgrammer to be the first one to get notified from me for future updates. Feel free to reach out to me anytime if you want to discuss something :D I would be more than happy if you send your feedbacks, suggestions or ask queries. Moreover, I love to make new friends and we can be friends, just drop me a mail. Thanks a lot for reading till end. You can contact me in case if you need any assistance:Email: theleanprogrammer@gmail.comWeb: Github: LinkedIn: http://madhavbahl.tech/ https://github.com/MadhavBahlMD https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhavba_hl/_

KickOff To Open Source!

Who Should read this ? If you are a medium or big size company and you are ready to start a Digital Transformation Project then this article might give you some useful information about various roles and responsibilities that are required for the project. Introduction The mid to late 1990s saw the initiation and implementation of many ERP projects to integrate horizontal business functions. Likewise, there is now momentum to initiate large-scale projects for Digital Transformation. Leading consulting companies define the following technologies as the building blocks of Digital Transformation: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Block Chain Internet of Things (IoT) Virtual Reality (VR) Augmented Reality (AR) 3D Printing Robotics Many enterprises are embarking on an AI-first road map to lead the Digital Transformation. In this article, I will discuss some important points to consider before kicking off an AI initiative. Note: In this article both Machine Learning and Deep Learning initiatives are considered AI. Before getting into the Project set up, a brief discussion of the key terms is in order. What is Artificial Intelligence? Though AI is defined in many ways, the most widely accepted one being “the field of computer science dedicated to solving cognitive problems commonly associated with human intelligence, such as learning, problem solving, and pattern recognition”, to me it is the idea that machines can possess intelligence. The heart of an Artificial Intelligence based system is its model. A model is nothing but a program that improves its knowledge through a learning process by making observations about its environment. This type of learning-based model is grouped under Supervised Learning. There are other models which come under the category of Unsupervised Learning Models. Why We Need to Build AI Models internally? An AI model developed on external data to solve a problem in a different organization might not produce satisfactory results for your organization, but this cookie-cutter approach is practiced by many IT vendors. In some specific & very narrow scenarios this cookie-cutter approach may work but is not transferable for a vast majority of the cases. Hence, we are better off developing new models from scratch or do Transfer Learning on top of the pre-trained models. [Transfer Learning is the ability of an AI to learn from different tasks and apply its pre-learned knowledge to a completely new task. The pre-training was done using the data which is not part of the organization]. What is Digital Transformation? To me, Digital Transformation is re-engineering the current business processes with information flow to plugin new technologies across various business functions without directly impacting employee head count. I will focus on a possible approach to augment business processes with AI based transformation. Essential Components for Success The success of AI depends on increased computing power and the development of complex algorithms to leverage exponentially growing data generated in transactional systems by humans and machines. With this basic information about Artificial Intelligence, I will walk you through the project setup. This could potentially be a Discovery and Evaluation phase for larger projects. First Things First The first and most important thing for any organization is to form an AI CORE team filled with a mix of adequately qualified technology and business experts. This approach is suitable for enterprises that are non-digital native [Companies that have not yet adopted Machine Learning (ML) or where small-scale machine learning algorithms like email spam detectors are currently being used]. Teams and Responsibilities These teams are experts in their respective domains and work together to achieve project goals. Data Science Team Define the medium and long-term Road Map for AI adoption in the organization Identify the short and medium-term research areas to address the organization’s business challenges For Example o Computer Vision(CV) vs Natural Language Processing (NLP), o Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) Vs Recurrent Neural network(RNN) Gather business scope to size the hardware and other infrastructure components Identify tools and frameworks for the Model development and deployment life cycle Build and Test the Models and Deploy it for Serving I personally do not recommend starting with Unsupervised training models (like Generative Models and Reinforcement Models) as they are still in their early stages and will take time to be mature enough for introduction into mainstream business processes. Infrastructure Team Decide the AI Model serving landscape (Cloud or Edge) Work with the Data Scientist and Application teams to define various frameworks and tools for the new landscape Work with the Data Scientist and Business expert teams for initial and scalable data growth for Model Training Define environments (Development, Training, Testing and Serving) to support the AI development life cycle for both Desktop and Mobile applications (though mobile based applications may not be required right now, it is still recommended to consider this for scalability purposes) Business Expertise Team Gather knowledge about the capabilities of AI and its suitability for the organization Identify business cases where AI implementation will be beneficial Define Acceptability Metrics for AI models Identify gaps in data available from transnational systems and rectify them Prepare Training and Test Data for AI models Application Team Identify gaps in data available from transactional systems and rectify them Develop tools to help business teams to label the data for Supervised Learning Below are a few scenarios where the development of tools would help - For the structured data available in existing databases, the business team might add classification categories such as Success Vs Failure or Class 1, Class 2, etc. for each record - For unstructured data in the Natural Language Processing category, such as customer complaints and Twitter feeds, the business team might want to add labels for sentiment analysis classifications (Positive Vs Negative) - For Computer Vision Models based on the type of data (medical images, photos, video streams, and satellite imagery) appropriate tools needs to be developed for labeling purposes (also called as ground truth). Develop skills in Data Cleaning, Augmentation, and Data Preparation Techniques/Programming Enhance business applications with newly deployed AI models, including new mobile apps Security Team Develop standards, guidelines, and checks for possible cyber security threats AI Model Development Life Cycle In the diagram below, I have proposed an AI model development cycle and its integration with business processes. C onclusion Once the teams are formed and adequately equipped from a resource perspective (for example, infrastructure and new skill augmentation), the project schedule with roll out phases could be defined based on the scope and availability of resources. I intentionally did not touch on budgeting as it varies widely based on many factors, which are beyond the scope of this article. Implementation scenario on BIG data Infrastructure It appears simple if I think of only utilizing just deep learning framework such as TensorFlow or MxNet or PyTorch to start an AI project. However, it may become complex , if the organization already invested in a BIG data infrastructure enabled with ML capabilities (for example Apache Spark or SAP HANA etc.). In the BIG Data Scenario, there are many ways to embed Deep Learning with the BIG Data Infrastructure. For example, With Apache Spark, the common workflows can be done with TensorFlow on Spark or Deep learning Pipelines. For HANA, at this stage, it is only possible to perform scoring on models that have already been created in TensorFlow and are being served by TensorFlow serving. As for training a TensorFlow model from HANA — that is not currently possible. A Strategical view, Visionary analysis and Key stockholders’ input are essential to finalize the Infrastructure. This strategy is only my opinion of course, for other people it might be easier to do things in a different way. Thank you for reading this article! Hope you found it interesting. Hit the clap button if you did! If you have any questions, you could hit me up on or send me an email (sekarnam@gmail.com). social media

AI Based Digital Transformation in Large Enterprises — Considerations Before Kickoff

A quick update, After going through closely five weeks of coding, I have concluded I am totally a The week of databases (last week) murdered me, and it’s a nightmare I know I have to sink into. Like, If I had to order my strongest to my weakest weeks at Makers, it would be the following: Front-End Developer. Welcome to the Web (HTTP/Browser) Javascript (This week, surprisingly) Object Orientated Design (Ruby code ) Oystercard challenge (More Ruby principles & testing) LIFE Databases Yes, my life seems way easier than understanding and implementing Databases. Although that this week is where the walkthroughs end, this blog is going to be about happy stuff. Happy stuff, by which I mean is code a Front-End Developer should touch on. From this blog post onwards, I’ll be touching on bits of HTML, , and more cool things that a supposed “front-end developer” is meant to know. CSS Javascript You can’t really tell where the box ends, but it’s a website! Yeah, doesn’t it look pretty? (Why, thank you). Today, this blog post is going to kick off into the world of HTML and CSS, and hopefully will kick me off into exploring this further in the blog posts to come. HTML? What is it ? is the coding language we use to print our data on screen. It basically is a connector of actual logic code (Ruby, Javascript) and lays out the coding logic on a page. They can be in forms of buttons, fill ins, shapes, text…and much more I assume. Hypertext MarkUp Language CSS? What is it ? Cascading style sheets is what we link our HTML files to, to make it look pretty. We can add different style attributes and features to each element in our HTML code. It’s basically the ultimate design feature that is used to make websites look good. Whoever thinks design is not important or vital, I shame you. Sure, it’s vital to get an app or a website working. However, when you are in the market where everyone is making “something that works”, how else will your website or app stand out. Design, and it’s so important how a web or app looks given it defines the choice of whether the user uses it or not. Can you argue with me there? (End of design rant) Let’s take a look at the code shall we… This is our HTML file for the website above we alway have a head and we always have a body section. In the head section, this is where we will put all our java/ruby code that we require or need for our code to run. Whether it is requiring files or packages, or css files, this is what the head section is used for. In our html file, this is where all our elements will go and be listed on the page. Once we link all our java or ruby code to our html file, we can then list out the elements (such as buttons, fill in forms) along with the text so that everything in our java/ruby code is connected to our display page. In our body file, This is part of our CSS file for the moment. Although I’m not showing you my entire CSS file at the moment, this picture is a great example because you can connect your styling to or you can connect them to HTML elements ( h1, h4, body) HTML class (.number). Will mention this later on. How do we even link our HTML and CSS code together? I always get frustrated whenever I talk about this because it took me a day to figure this out when it was one simple line. As we put “files we have to require” in the head section, we will put this one liner in the head section. So what do we have here? We have the rel= “stylesheet” which defines that this line of code, is going to be linking a stylesheet! If you don’t do this, it just ends up typing out that line as boring black text. Then, the type = “text/css” defines that this style sheet is going to be in CSS as I assume one would make this because there could be different types of code you could use to style? Lastly, and this is important: “href = “style.css” where we will ink our css file to our html file. When you are normally coding with a lot of files, we normally put all our CSS files in a so we know all our CSS files will be there. I believe you then have to say “href = “style/style.css” to tell the program, hey this “style.css” is in the “style folder” Note: ‘Style folder’ Let’s look at the CSS code line by line (or section would be better actually): In the body section, we are setting our margin and padding to zero. What is this? If you inspect any page and look in elements, a little box will turn up that is layered with different boxes and different colours. I believe, by default, a website or web page has a set margin and set padding so that you can split your content with equal space. As designers turn coders or design-coders, the power of design comes when we can edit everything, down to every single text and element in our HTML. Having done a few projects, I always love setting the margin and padding to zero because you then know that you have no spaces on your web page. I mean, if you don’t, you’ll be experimenting what the space range is on your website every-time. Sigh, it’s always good to have an empty canvas with nothing that will disturb you or shock you. Next, we have the h1 feature: : This means that it’s a header. There is h1 to h7, and they come as default text sizes to show hierarchy on a web page. In html, it’s normally written as <h1></h1> and this goes for most elements in html. As I love to say… H1 When one tag opens, one tag will close We have the following features listed, which some are pretty simple: font-size (Size of font. Although headers come in default fonts, you can still change their size which is pretty cool.) font-family(You have Arial, Times, Georgia, Comic Sans — NEVER DO COMIC SANS — ) color (this means font color, as would be “background-color”) background-color position- absolute; (This is quite an interesting one we will talk about, and it comes with the rest below..) For all CSS documentation, you will always write this syntax: element { font-size: 20px; } is an interesting attribute because it allows you to move stuff on the page. Position settings such as (“fixed”, “static” or “initial”) will not allow you to custom move your elements around as, hence their names. “initial” I believe means the default setting you set it to. position I find using “absolute” puts your element in its own box, and thus it allows you to move that element wherever on the page. Now, that we have position installed, we can then write the percentages of where it will move to. Although position has all four directions (top, bottom, right, left), we actually only need “left” and “top”. Why is this? Well, if we pick the top feature, what would be top = 0% and what would be top = 100%? 0% top will be right at the top of the page whilst 100% will be at the bottom of the page! Hence, we don’t need a bottom at all. This is the same for needing only left, when we don’t need right. You can do this for practically any html element in any html tag. However, what if you are not using a html tag or element? How are we gonna fit that in? CLASSES. As every code has classes, HTML has it’s own clever class feature too. Let’s look at this piece of code in my example: Although we are using h4 for the degrees celcius, what about the span. Span, i this case is our number that is connecting from our javascript code. How would I style that? I’m not using any html tag or element. Yes, you can see that I’ve included it in a class and all I’ve typed is simp;y class = “number” Here, I have implanted that the css element that I will be editing for this element of HTML code is number. Now, if we look in our CSS code…. Will you look at that? Now I can edit stuff in my HTML, including the ones where I don’t use HTML elements or tags. However, I can already feel the next question come up…how do I then style multiple things in my code. That my friends, is called a <div> block. Like how all coding languages have blocks, in html we have <div> and we can determine a class inside the div block. You can either section your code our in div files or we’ll do something more interesting, we’ll have a look at what I’ve used a div block for. What is all this lingo? This is html for a circle. You recognise most of the syntax as I’ve mentioned it before except for three features. moz-border-radius, -webkit-border-radius and border-radius. These are all “radius-ses” that is need for the circle. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s the giant big blue circle behind the font. You can create different shapes, depending on the different features you apply in the div block. (You can search links on how to do so). However, let’s look at this in context and by context, i mean PRIORITY. We can conclude that the circle is above all the content of the code (which are the buttons you see on screen). Yes, it does as if we put it last in our code, our content will cover up all the content. It’s a tricky concept to get your mind around but I’ll try explain it in the best way possible. Does it matter what order you put your code in? If you come from any creative background, then this explanation will be easier for you to understand. If not, try see what I mean. Have you ever used Photoshop or most creative softwares? If you haven’t that’s okay, I’ll go through it anyway. In any creative program, or most I believe, there are things called layers. If you see the insert of more rectangles popping up, those are layers. This allows us to build stuff on top of each other. In other words, right now, the GIF above shows that we are only looking at one image. However, how we created that image are in layers. It works the same way with CSS or HTML, when we are thinking when to put elements before or after. The higher you put an element in your body, it’s more likely to be the earlier layers and if you put it last, it will be the current layer you see and cover all the elements under in. LETS LOOK AT A BUTTON. A button is quite interesting to format in CSS because it is an interactive feature. A default button normally looks as such: This is what HTML serves us, when we create a button function as such… Buttons can be written in different ways, but this is one way to do them. Let’s take the power save button and have a look on what we’ve done with the CSS. Note: The class is called Save On. What’s new here, is actually the padding. We know what padding is and does, but for a button, it’s important if we are going to stylize a button, that we give the text some space. I believe in padding it’s by height and width. Note: Be careful how you size and pad you buttons, because users still need to be able to click on those buttons. Padding only gives you so much room for your button to be able to click. (As in it can only be clicked on the center). Though, here’s a neat trick. As in our code, this button turns the PowerSaveMode On and the PowerSafeMode Off, what if we want the buttons to change colour if this happens. Ah! That is not for our CSS file unfortunately. This is because our CSS file nor our HTML file is in charge or as we coders say, our “controller” to view the files. Our controller would have been done in JQUERY and Javascript. Although, this is a post for another time, you can see the $ sign and the css implemented in the code somewhere…this is where our if statement comes in, and alters our CSS elements given that this JQUERY file is the controller where it links everything together… Fun Fact of the Day: It’s really crazy how in art school, code was an imaginary tool. It was like the alien lingo that was bestowed on us in 2017, and we were cavemen using it to make shapes or move a ball from one part of the screen to another. After graduating from one of the top claimed art universities in London, Central Saint Martins, coding isn’t that much big of a deal (Talking about HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT here, by which I mean the FRONT END). Like anything to learn, it just takes time to pick up and the learning never ends.

Episode 22: A kick off into basics of HTML and CSS

As I prepare to take my terrifying leap into hackademia, I've been freelancing a lot more lately—both as a way to freshen up some of my more rusty skills (Directing leaves little room for slinging code or technical writing), and as a way to offset some of the lost income (teachers are criminally underpaid in this country, so please hire me). In one of the projects I'm working on—a custom job board for a company in the energy and infrastructure industry—I recently had a need to add a "copy to" feature, allowing hiring managers to copy an application to another listing without modifying or removing the original record. It's not a straight copy, though. Most of the values remain unchanged, but the status of the new application itself needs to be reset, and the relationship to the new Job obviously changes as well. "Good Enough" Isn't Always Good Enough Now, this is hardly the most complicated thing in the world. Early in my career, I would have just grabbed each of the values I needed from the record, and re-created it from scratch right there. As an example, let's say we needed to retrieve a job application by an $id: $application = Application::findOrFail($id); The old-school way I would have solved this would be to create a new record, referencing each of the original $application values, like so: Application::create([
	'name' => $application->name,
	'email' => $application->email,
	// ...
]); You get the idea. This gets the job done, but is challenging for a few reasons, the most important one is the fragility of the implementation. What if we add new columns to the applications table? Or we updated the implementation of the Application model itself? This "brute-force" method means that we then have to both remember we implemented our copy function like this, and then update it to reflect reality. It works, but it's not sustainable. Don't Be Too Clever Later on in my career, I probably would have grabbed an array of the record values and then removed the elements I didn't need with an unset() or array_diff_key() or some other method (there's no one right way to do things, and I don't feel like thinking too hard about how I would have handled this in the past) and created the new record from that. It would have probably looked something like this: $values = array_diff_key($application->getAttributes(), [
				'id' => true,
				'job_id' => true,
				'status' => true,
			]); This works, and is mostly Vanilla PHP, but is almost a little too clever. You have to know that any key set to true in the second parameter of array_diff_key gets removed from the original array. It's a nuance that requires documentation, or a comment, and lowers readability for more junior engineers. A less clever (less clever is a good thing), yet more readable solution would instead probably look something like this: $values = $application->getAttributes();

unset($values['id'], $values['job_id', $values['status']); Again, it relies on more Vanilla PHP, but makes the implementation more clear. We're getting the attributes of the original application, and explicitly unsetting what we don't need. Know Thy Toolbelt For a long time, I've felt that it's important to embrace the underlying toolset of the framework you are working under, both for a "best practices" standpoint and an onboarding standpoint (you can argue all you want with your coworkers about the "right" way to do things, but basing your standards off of the ones encouraged by your tools gives you a higher foundation to start from. In the case of Laravel, there is a built-in method for copying an Eloquent model, leaving you with a new instance that you can work with. It's called replicate() , and it does the job of automatically excluding the primary key, lets you define what other attributes you'd like to not copy over, and creates a new model instance that you can interact with (instead of having to create one yourself). See below: $application->replicate(['job_id', 'status'])
			->fill([
				'job_id' => $job_id
			])
			->save(); As you can see, the solution is readable (we are literally replicating the $application object without the job_id and status attributes, filling in a new job_id, and saving the record). It's a one-liner without all of the maintainability concerns that one-liners often come with. Pilot to Copilot One of the biggest challenges of getting spun up on a new language or framework is those sticky "unknown unknowns." You can be a great developer with many years of experience, but that doesn't mean you natively understand the dialect of a technology you've never used before. In the past, research and mentorship were often the only way to approach this. The best way to know is to make mistakes and be told how to improve. But, thanks to modern tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT, you can ask the questions you want to ask and let that kick off your research, rather than blindly groping around the documentation or hoping someone asked a question on a forum one day that solves your problem. A simple Is this the best way accomplish this? goes a long way. For myself, replicate() wasn't something I knew or had needed to use in the past. It was a suggestion by Github Copilot Chat because I knew how to accomplish the task, but I needed to riff off of someone to make sure I was doing it in a way that felt "good" to me. As I prepare to take my terrifying leap into hackademia , I've been freelancing a lot more lately—both as a way to freshen up some of my more rusty skills (Directing leaves little room for slinging code or technical writing), and as a way to offset some of the lost income (teachers are criminally underpaid in this country, so please hire me ). hackademia hire me In one of the projects I'm working on—a custom job board for a company in the energy and infrastructure industry—I recently had a need to add a "copy to" feature, allowing hiring managers to copy an application to another listing without modifying or removing the original record. It's not a straight copy, though. Most of the values remain unchanged, but the status of the new application itself needs to be reset, and the relationship to the new Job obviously changes as well. Most "Good Enough" Isn't Always Good Enough Now, this is hardly the most complicated thing in the world. Early in my career, I would have just grabbed each of the values I needed from the record, and re-created it from scratch right there. As an example, let's say we needed to retrieve a job application by an $id : $id $application = Application::findOrFail($id); $application = Application::findOrFail($id); The old-school way I would have solved this would be to create a new record, referencing each of the original $application values, like so: $application Application::create([
	'name' => $application->name,
	'email' => $application->email,
	// ...
]); Application::create([
	'name' => $application->name,
	'email' => $application->email,
	// ...
]); You get the idea. This gets the job done, but is challenging for a few reasons, the most important one is the fragility of the implementation. What if we add new columns to the applications table? Or we updated the implementation of the Application model itself? This "brute-force" method means that we then have to both remember we implemented our copy function like this, and then update it to reflect reality. applications Application remember It works, but it's not sustainable. Don't Be Too Clever Later on in my career, I probably would have grabbed an array of the record values and then removed the elements I didn't need with an unset() or array_diff_key() or some other method (there's no one right way to do things, and I don't feel like thinking too hard about how I would have handled this in the past) and created the new record from that. It would have probably looked something like this: unset() array_diff_key() something $values = array_diff_key($application->getAttributes(), [
				'id' => true,
				'job_id' => true,
				'status' => true,
			]); $values = array_diff_key($application->getAttributes(), [
				'id' => true,
				'job_id' => true,
				'status' => true,
			]); This works, and is mostly Vanilla PHP, but is almost a little too clever. You have to know that any key set to true in the second parameter of array_diff_key gets removed from the original array. It's a nuance that requires documentation, or a comment, and lowers readability for more junior engineers. mostly too true array_diff_key A less clever (less clever is a good thing), yet more readable solution would instead probably look something like this: $values = $application->getAttributes();

unset($values['id'], $values['job_id', $values['status']); $values = $application->getAttributes();

unset($values['id'], $values['job_id', $values['status']); Again, it relies on more Vanilla PHP, but makes the implementation more clear. We're getting the attributes of the original application, and explicitly unsetting what we don't need. Know Thy Toolbelt For a long time, I've felt that it's important to embrace the underlying toolset of the framework you are working under, both for a "best practices" standpoint and an onboarding standpoint (you can argue all you want with your coworkers about the "right" way to do things, but basing your standards off of the ones encouraged by your tools gives you a higher foundation to start from. In the case of Laravel, there is a built-in method for copying an Eloquent model, leaving you with a new instance that you can work with. It's called replicate() , and it does the job of automatically excluding the primary key, lets you define what other attributes you'd like to not copy over, and creates a new model instance that you can interact with (instead of having to create one yourself). replicate() See below: $application->replicate(['job_id', 'status'])
			->fill([
				'job_id' => $job_id
			])
			->save(); $application->replicate(['job_id', 'status'])
			->fill([
				'job_id' => $job_id
			])
			->save(); As you can see, the solution is readable (we are literally replicating the $application object without the job_id and status attributes, filling in a new job_id , and saving the record). It's a one-liner without all of the maintainability concerns that one-liners often come with. $application job_id status job_id Pilot to Copilot One of the biggest challenges of getting spun up on a new language or framework is those sticky "unknown unknowns." You can be a great developer with many years of experience, but that doesn't mean you natively understand the dialect of a technology you've never used before. In the past, research and mentorship were often the only way to approach this. The best way to know is to make mistakes and be told how to improve. But, thanks to modern tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT , you can ask the questions you want to ask and let that kick off your research, rather than blindly groping around the documentation or hoping someone asked a question on a forum one day that solves your problem. GitHub Copilot ChatGPT A simple Is this the best way accomplish this? goes a long way. Is this the best way accomplish this? For myself, replicate() wasn't something I knew or had needed to use in the past. It was a suggestion by Github Copilot Chat because I knew how to accomplish the task, but I needed to riff off of someone to make sure I was doing it in a way that felt "good" to me. replicate() how

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