Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

NASA has begun to open source some code if you are looking to dig into a cool project you might start there:

Today we are launching code.nasa.gov, the latest member of the open NASA web family. Through this website, we will continue, unify, and expand NASA’s open source activities. The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution.
In our initial release, we are focusing on providing a home for the current state of open source at the Agency. This includes guidance on how to engage the open source process, points of contact, and a directory of existing projects. By elucidating the process, we hope to lower the barriers to building open technology in partnership with the public.

code.NASA

Processing huge amounts of data is going to be the next big thing. One of the open source tools for doing so is Apache’s hadoop:

What Is Apache Hadoop?
The Apache™ Hadoop™ project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing.

The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-avaiability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-availabile service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.

hadoop

Can’t do much with machine learning and artificial intelligence with out data so I started to put together a list of free online sources of data:

Spam Assassin Public Corpus
The Official WhitePages
Blekko
National Weather Service
Infochimps
OpenStreetMap
Yahoo! Finance
Google Books
Census Bureau Home Page
Bureau of Labor Statistics Home Page
Welcome to Infomine: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections
NewsLibrary.com
American Religion Data Archive
Demographia
Government Web Resources
MedlinePlus
Internet Archive
Clark Library
Household Products Database
Econo data
St. Louis Fed: Economic Research
National Bureau of Economic Research
Fed Stats
Supreme Court
Complete Planet
Iowa Electronic Markets
Tax stats
GSS General Social Survey
PMC Biomedical and Life Sciences Journal Literature
Google’s Ngram Viewer

Human Computer Interfaces
Game Theory
Probabilistic Graphical Models
Computer Science 101
Software as a Service
Machine Learning
Natural Language Processing
Cryptography
Design and Analysis of Algorithms I
and
Lean Launchpad
Technology Entrepreneurship

I can’t recommend these classes enough. I’ve taken the iPhone Development, Intro to Artificial Intelligence, Intro to Databases, and Machine Learning classes.

It’s my thought that the future of education will not be 4 year degrees on site, but life long learning at home.

If you need to brush up on some math first try Khan Academy, Wolfram Math World.

Octave (download)

Install Octave per directions.
To start Octave from a command line create the following file and place it with permissions 755 in /user/local/bin

file name: Octave
#!/bin/bash
open /Applications/Octave.app

Next edit /Applications/Octave.app/Contents/Resources/bin/mkoctfile
Add these lines to the bottom of the file:
# fixes to make gnuplot behave
CFLAGS=”-m32 ${CFLAGS}”
FFLAGS=”-m32 ${FFLAGS}”
CPPFLAGS=”-m32 ${CPPFLAGS}”
CXXFLAGS=”-m32 ${CXXFLAGS}”
LDFLAGS=”-m32 ${LDFLAGS}”

GNU Plot (download)

Install per directions.
Edit the file /Applications/Gnuplot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot
Edit the 5th and 6th lines below and save

# Setting up various path information variables that are needed to
# startup the Gnuplot program.
GNUPLOT_HOME=”${ROOT}”
PATH=”${ROOT}/bin:${PATH}”
# DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=”${ROOT}/lib:${DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH}”
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=”${ROOT}/lib”
DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH=”${ROOT}/lib:${DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH}”

More information:
Stack Overflow directions to fix GNUPlot to work with Octave on OSX