A new F# meetup is starting in Portland, OR! The first session is scheuled for Saturday, May 17, a Hands on Introduction to Machine Learning with F#.
Mathias Brandewinder (@brandewinder on Twitter) has graciously agreed to lead a three hour dojo giving a practical, hands-on, experience with F# and functional programming. We will be writing a machine learning classifier that recognizes hand-written numbers using F#. Who can resist? Come join us! (Location TBD; the party will continue over dinner and drinks afterward.)
Machine Learning is the art of writing programs that get better at performing a task as they gain experience, without being explicitly programmed to do so. Feed your program more data, and it will get smarter at handling new situations.
Some machine learning algorithms use fairly advanced math, but simple approaches can be surprisingly effective. In this session, we'll take a classic Machine Learning challenge from Kaggle.com, automatically recognizing hand-written digits (http://www.kaggle.com/c/digit-recognizer), and build a classifier, from scratch, using F#. So bring your laptop, and let's see how smart we can make our machines!
This session will be organized as an interactive workshop. Come over, and learn yourself a Machine Learning and F# for great good! No prior experience with Machine Learning required, and F# beginners are very welcome - it will be a great opportunity to see F# in action, and why it's awesome.
To get the most from the session please try and bring a laptop along with F# installed (ideally either Xamarin Studio, MonoDevelop or Visual Studio); you can find detailed instructions for OSX, Linux and Windows on fsharp.org.
And if you've never used F# before and want a head-start, check the great online intro tutorials on TryFSharp.org.
Find out more here:http://www.meetup.com/Portland-F-Meetup-Group/events/178590512/