Articles

Sparse Modeling Using HiFive Unleashed (RISC-V)

Greetings, world! My name is Kawano - I'm a data scientist intern here at Hacarus who joined last year November. I'm a master's student who typically spends time doing research by analyzing insect behavior (for the record, I'm an information science major!). As an intern at Hacarus, I work on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) projects. Anywho, let's get straight to it- have you ever heard of the RISC-V? I'll be putting in hardware called the Debian into a RISC-V…

Sparse Modeling with SPRESENSE

Hello, I’m Kishimoto! I’m an Edge Engineer intern who has been working at Hacarus for quite some time now. Last year, Sony released an Arduino IDE supported, high-performance board computer called, SPRESENSE, which I’ll be talking about today! SPRESENSE is an Arduino-compatible edge device loaded with a high-performance CPU. Using the SPRESENSE, I wanted to test its capabilities for edge machine learning, which is often difficult to achieve due to the low computing power of edge devices. In recent years, the…

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…

Sparse Modeling For IT Engineers

Technical Introduction to Sparse Modeling

This post 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. 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 of machine learning and particularly deep learning, based on data acquisition and collection of information through the cloud…

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,…