Back during the year 2018, I was looking for ways to solve pressing problems in India and globally by applying modern Machine Learning (ML) techniques. I made some notes in that pursuit. Sharing them so that others can find it useful if not outdated completely. Thanks to my friends Anirudha, and Akshay and smart & … Continue reading Positioning Machine Learning for Emerging India and Developing World (last updated in 2018)
Author: Sanjay Thakur
My main learnings from 3-month long power-packed EF Form
From September 2020 until almost mid January 2021, I participated in a jam-packed program called Form from the highly coveted EF (https://www.joinef.com/). For a person like who had never been exposed to the commercial side of things, this period led me through like-never-before personal growth. And oh boy, it challenged every nook and corner of … Continue reading My main learnings from 3-month long power-packed EF Form
Launching RydeSafely
For the past few months, Tom (CEO at Rydesafely) and I have been churning out customer discovery calls one after another strictly abiding by the principles of the Mom test. This strategy was tightly coupled with our intent to squeeze the most of our respective experiences of facing the brunt of not being able to … Continue reading Launching RydeSafely
The Legacy of Sushant Singh Rajput
Sushant Singh Rajput (SSR) died under mysterious circumstances on 14 June, 2020. It breaks my heart to see such a loss to India and to the whole world. He was a manifestation of versatality, curiosity, hope, self-belief, intellect, perserverance, and energy. His work, interests, vision have been nothing short of an inspiration - investments in … Continue reading The Legacy of Sushant Singh Rajput
A New Economy called Space and its Transformative Effects on Earth
TL;DR Humans have again started to work actively to set up a permanent base in the space and on other celestial bodies. Factors that led to this renewed interest in space include developments in our space-related technologies, better understanding of rocket science, discovery of compelling resources outside of earth, economic arithmetic and our very own, … Continue reading A New Economy called Space and its Transformative Effects on Earth
Hardware-based Challenges for building Autonomous Robots
In my other blog post, I showed my optimism towards a world with Neural Networks (NN) based autonomous robots by listing the current pain points and their potential lines of solutions around such software systems. The development of NN infused robots has not seen as fast development as in fields like computer vision and NLP, … Continue reading Hardware-based Challenges for building Autonomous Robots
Challenges for building Neural Network-based Autonomous Robots
BB8, Dum-E, Wall-E, C-3PO, R2-D2, Optimus Prime, you name it, I don't think there is anyone who hasn't been captivated by these robots. After all, who does not want a friend that can assist us to commute while we lay back and lift our boxes while we move out? Ever since I started learning machine … Continue reading Challenges for building Neural Network-based Autonomous Robots
Uncertainty Aware Learning from Demonstrations in Multiple Contexts using Bayesian Neural Networks
Paper Status: Accepted to ICRA 2019 Link to the paper, code, presentation, videos, poster. Learning to make decisions in the real world is hard for a plethora of reasons. The decision-making architecture or controller has to not only find a good representation but also has to display a high degree of adaptability and versatility. This whole … Continue reading Uncertainty Aware Learning from Demonstrations in Multiple Contexts using Bayesian Neural Networks
Learning from Demonstrations – I
Lately, I have been thinking deeply (pun intended) of Imitation Learning and its prospects for enabling fully autonomous robots and cobots. This will help us not do what we really do not want to do. Well, you might say, "look Sanjay, there is nothing groundbreaking about this idea and you are definitely not the first and … Continue reading Learning from Demonstrations – I
The very Basics of Bayesian Neural Networks
By the virtue of its ability to approximate any function([1], [2]), Neural Network~(NN) based architectures have achieved massive success in learning complex input-output mappings from data. However, mere knowledge of the input-output mapping falls short on a lot of situations especially that need to integrate beliefs in the model or where data is limited. Bayesian … Continue reading The very Basics of Bayesian Neural Networks