Today I gave a talk ”Science and Software Development” at the weactuallybuildstuff.com. The talk was largely inspired by Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” column and book and try to apply some of the ideas relating to the use and abuse of evidence in the software industry. In the talk I tried to build a case for why the software industry might by to pay more attention to scientific techniques, such as “Randomized Controlled Trails”, by talking about availability bias, Confirmation Bias, the placebo effect and o[...]

This Monday the San Francisco Bay Area F# Meetup will be hearing from Jon Harrop on the topic of "Building a customizable business rules engine with F#" Business rules are the core of business applications; yet, once an application is deployed, it is often cumbersome and expensive to update existing rules. This problem is particularly important in some industries, like finance, where new products, which require new rules, are introduced on a regular basis. In this talk, Jon Harrop will demonstrate how F# c[...]

 A late reminder of the F# meetup in New York tonight - Thursday, November 29, 2012, 6:30 PM {m}brace - F# in the Cloud with George Stavroulakis of the {m}brace team  With the advent of cloud platforms and private data centers, developers face once more the challenges of distributed computing in their effort to harness the available computing power. Concurrency, message passing, elasticity and machine failure are now common situations that the developer has to take into account while developing code needed[...]

An important library in the C# and F# open source communities is the Math.NET Numerics library. I blogged the first part in a (slow) series on using the library from F# back in June and there is another tutorial as part of the Numerical Libraries for F# and the .NET Framework overview from early last year. We also use this library in Expert F# 3.0, Chapter 10, in the chapter on "Programming With Numbers", and the library is also used in the new Try F# 3.0 website. The library has received a scrub recently,[...]

I am still working my way through “Machine Learning in Action”, converting the samples from Python to F#. I am currently in the middle of chapter 6, dedicated to Support Vector Machines, which has given me more trouble than the previous ones. This post will be sharing my current progress: the code I have so far is a working translation of the naïve SVM implementation, presented in the first half of the chapter. We’ll get to kernels, and the full Platt SMO algorithm in a later post – today will be solely di[...]