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The future is now . . .
Hey friends!
This is my first weekly newsletter coming every Sunday! If you find this useful, please feel free to invite your friends by simply sharing the link below.
jousef.substack.com
Upcoming Podcast
I am incredibly happy and honoured to have talked to one of the most famous people in the Reinforcement Learning community, namely Andy G. Barto! This podcast won’t go into deep technical details but we will talk about the RL concept and Andy’s path - he is also giving some good advices in general, so stay tuned!
Books
This week, I posted my first book from the “Book Club” series. It is called “A Theory of Human Motivation” by Abraham Harold Maslow! 📖⠀
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Abraham Harold Maslow (1908 – 1970) was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.⠀⠀⠀
Maslow first presented his hierarchy of needs. It was first printed in his paper "A Theory of Human Motivation". Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, some of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. Maslow descibed various needs and used the terms "Physiological, Safety, Belongingnes and Love, Esteem, Self-Actualization and Self-Transcendence" needs to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through. Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people.
Let me know in the comments what books you are currently reading, I am constantly looking for more brain food! 🙂
Podcast
This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Luis Bollinger from Holo-Light talking about Augmented Reality (AR) and how it can be used in engineering, that was super interesting! One of the big things coming in the next years will be Augmented Reality, so I think it makes perfect sense to learn more about it and prepare for the future!
Artificial Intelligence
In this weeks newsletter, I would also like to share my favourite articles, links & Tweets in the field of AI.
DeepMind
In a major scientific breakthrough, the latest version of #AlphaFold has been recognised as a solution to one of biology's grand challenges - the “protein folding problem”. DeepMind has posted a great video explaining how they worked on this problem, really dope!
Autoencoder
As I am currently writing my thesis in the field of geometric deep learning, to be more precise, (next step) prediction of components, autoencoders as well as GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) are quite common in this topic.
But what is an autoencoder?
This picture depicts the three main steps in an autoencoder:
Encoder network: We take some input x (for example a geometry, an image etc.) and reduce the dimension from y to z by using an encoder (a neural network)
Latent space z: Our goal is that the latent space z has some meaning or a specific representation of a smaller dimension and is an intermediate step.
Decoder network: We use the decoder to reconstruct the original object with the original dimensions. This is the step from z to x*.
We can measure the loss for reconstruction with specific distances between x & x*.
Now we are trying to find parameters of the encoder that would minimize the reconstruction loss updating it by the well known gradient descent.
To learn more about autoencoders and GANs, you can enroll in the Coursera specialization for GANs here.
If you want to learn more about Artificial Intelligence, makes sure to check out my folder with courses I personally recommend and take!
Visualize Ideas
As some of you might already know, I am also creating visuals for 100 days straight. My personal favourite this week is the visualized quote:
"Arrogance is insecurity in disguise." - @IAmMyBestToday
If you would like to see more of these visualized ideas, make sure to follow me on this Instagram profile! :)
Engineering
AMG posted my favourite car this week! The Mercedes-AMG C 63 S Coupé, stunning!
Favourite animation
Make sure to follow Dave on Twitter, he creates some mesmerising animations!
Favourite Places
Random Links
Here are some topics that I find very useful:
Get past the Imposter syndrome
“Everyday you work a little harder than the average people, you will make a huge difference”
Creating photorealistic portraits of Roman Emperors using GAN-based tools.
Roman Emperor Project Using GAN-based tools to help create photorealistic portraits of Roman Emperors from historical references Project voshart.com/ROMAN-EMPEROR-… Article medium.com/@voshart/photo…
Note: Sharing tweets does not automatically mean that I endorse the people running the accounts and of course, all opinions are my own! ;-)
Memes
For quite some time now, a talented Turkish street drummer (Bilal Göregen) is breaking the internet as a new meme, super hilarious!
Closing Remarks
If you have any wishes for video topics, you can submit them in this form. Apart from that you can always reach out to me via Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn, so let’s connect!
For any business related issues or collaborations, feel free to write me an email to engineeredmindbusiness@gmail.com!
And of course, if you want to support the podcast, newsletter & YouTube channel in general, feel free to have a look at my Patreon profile!
See you next week and in the meantime, make sure to keep engineering your mind!
Jousef