Articles

A Casual Morning for Tea Ceremony with Hacarus!

Experiencing Tea Ceremony in Kyoto at Hacarus   In the morning, Hacarus visited Jinmatsuan, a place where you can personally experience a bit of Japanese culture through their workshops and events. I'm going to explain a bit about the history, process, and significance in the way of tea ceremony with some pictures we took during the ritual! What is tea ceremony, what makes it special and from where does it originate? In its most simplest sense, tea ceremony (sado) or…

My PyCon Indonesia Experience

Recently, I've become active in attending and speaking at PyCon events. This time, I've attended PyCon Indonesia.   The event was held at Kalbis Institute last November 3-4 2018 and it is the second PyCon event in Indonesia since last year. I find it really amazing how they were able to grow the community in such a short amount of time. The topics discussed spanned across multiple topics about Python. The speakers who shared their experiences are a mix of…

Devfest Philippines 2018 Experience

“That’s not possible”. “Not in my lifetime”. “That will be too expensive”. These are some of the words you will usually hear from people when there is a discussion about intelligent systems like artificial intelligence (AI). For most of us, an intelligent system is something that’s too expensive or too advanced. But that was the case years ago. Now, we live in a world where this kind of system is  everywhere. From our smartphones to more complex machines, intelligent systems are…

Why Montreal and Toronto are winning the AI race and Vancouver is not

As a CEO of AI startup, I always wanted to see what the AI ecosystem in Canada looks like so I did it. This is a quick report of my business trip to Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and here is the reason why first two cities are winning the AI race while other cities are yet to catch up, at least from my point of view. First off,  I'm a complete stranger in Canada. My observation might be inaccurate and biased.…

Workshop at Kyoto Startup Summer School

Kyoto Startup Summer School (KS3) is the program offered by Kyoto Institute of Technology Design Lab (KIT D-Lab). I've been teaching the students at KIT since 2016. This is my second time conducting an Arduino workshop at KS3. You must be wondering why CEO of AI startup is teaching hardware stuff. For those who know the history of Hacarus, it's no wonder. For those who don't, let me explain a bit. Hacarus was founded as a hardware/IoT startup in January 2014.…

My PyCon Korea Experience

Last August 18-19, I attended PyCon Korea as a speaker. My expectations were somewhat mixed since it was the first international PyCon I attended. But now, I definitely think it was one of the best conventions I've attended so far. Here are some highlights and things I've learned from the event. The entire event lasted for five days divided into "Sprints", "Tutorials" and the actual 2-day conference. Sprints (Wednesday - Friday) were actual coding sessions leading to contributions to open…

Image recognition on the iPhone using machine learning with CoreML

Hi, my name is Matsuyama, and I work at Hacarus. Today I write about how to use Vision and CoreML, which was a hot topic at the last WWDC. This time, I created an application that displays a label and confidence level for identified objects. I used models provided by Apple and a custom model converted to ML model from Caffe using Python.  Here is how it looks like. What is Vision Framework? Vision framework performs face detection, text detection,…

Sparse Modeling For IT Engineers

Introduction to Sparse Modeling for IT Engineers

Part 1 This series introduces a technique called "Sparse Modeling" that can produce good analysis results, even if the amount of data is small. The article was written for engineers who want to start on machine learning and for those who have already experience with deep learning. In this first part of the series, we look at the background of sparse modeling. Note: The original version of this article was published in Japanese on Codezine.jp: 機械学習プロジェクトにおける課題と、スパースモデリングに期待が高まる背景   Introduction The field…

Practice Zazen Meditation

Our team went to a second Zazen experience, this time at Shunkoin Temple in Ukyo-ku. This temple stands in an area with many other temples, it's easy to get lost there.Mr. Someda’s Google Map has stopped to navigate him on the way. At Shunkoin Temple, all Zazen lectures are held in English. Most of the participants are from overseas.   Mr. Kawakami, a monk, learned about religion studies and religious conflicts when traveling to the United States after graduating from…

Release of spm-image : Python library for sparse modeling

We’ve released spm-image, Python library for sparse modeling and compressive sensing, in our GitHub. Its latest version includes k-SVD, which is one of popular dictionary learning algorithms, ADMM implementation of Lasso and ZCA whitening for preprocessing. We’ve created example notebooks as well so that you can get to know how to use this library.The basic concept of this library is as follows Implements sparse modeling and compressive sensing algorithms Depends on scikit-learn only Compliant with module and interface structure of scikit-learn as much…