#105: Colorizing and Restoring Old Images with Deep Learning

Published Fri, Nov 23, 2018, recorded Wed, Nov 21, 2018

Brian #1: Colorizing and Restoring Old Images with Deep Learning

Text interview by Charlie Harrington of Jason Antic, developer of DeOldify
A whole bunch of machine learning buzzwords that I don’t understand in the slightest combine to make a really cool to to make B&W photos look freaking amazing.
“This is a deep learning based model. More specifically, what I've done is combined the following approaches:
- Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network
- Training structure inspired by (but not the same as) Progressive Growing of GANs.
- Two Time-Scale Update Rule.
- Generator Loss is two parts: One is a basic Perceptual Loss (or Feature Loss) based on VGG16. The second is the loss score from the critic.”

Michael #2: PlatformIO IDE for VSCode

via Jason Pecor
PlatformIO is an open source ecosystem for IoT development
Cross-platform IDE and unified debugger. Remote unit testing and firmware updates
Built on Visual Studio Code which has a nice extension for Python
PlatformIO, combined with the features of VSCode provides some great improvements for project development over the standard Arduino IDE for Arduino-compatible microcontroller based solutions.
Some of these features are paid, but it’s a reasonable price
With Python becoming more popular for microcontroller design, as well, this might be a very nice option for designers.
And for Jason’s, specifically, it provides a single environment that can eventually be configured to handle doing the embedded code design, associated Python supporting tools mods, and HDL development.
The PlatformIO Core written in Python. Python 2.7 (hiss…)
Jason’s test drive video from Tuesday: Test Driving PlatformIO IDE for VSCode

Brian #3: Python Data Visualization 2018: Why So Many Libraries?

Nice overview of visualization landscape, by Anaconda team
Differentiating factors, API types, and emerging trends
Related: Drawing Data with Flask and matplotlib
- Finally! A really simple example app in Flask that shows how to both generate and display matplotlib plots.
- I was looking for something like this about a year ago and didn’t find it.

Full Visual Studio Code, but in your browser
Code in the browser
Access up to 96 cores
VS Code + extensions, so all the languages and features
Collaborate in real time, think google docs
Access linux from any OS
Note: They sponsored an episode of Talk Python To Me, but this is not an ad here...

Brian #5: By Welcoming Women, Python’s Founder Overcomes Closed Minds In Open Source

Forbes’s article about Guido and the Python community actively working to get more women involved in core development as well as speaking at conferences.
Good lessons for other projects, and work teams, about how you cannot just passively “let people join”, you need to work to make it happen.

Michael #6: Machine Learning Basics

From Anna-Lena Popkes
Plain python implementations of basic machine learning algorithms
Repository contains implementations of basic machine learning algorithms in plain Python (modern Python, yay!)
All algorithms are implemented from scratch without using additional machine learning libraries.
Goal is to provide a basic understanding of the algorithms and their underlying structure, not to provide the most efficient implementations.
Most of the algorithms
Anna-Lena was on Talk Python on 186: http://talkpython.fm/186

Extras:

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