Interview with Doug Duhaime, contributor to Google’s Dev Library

Posted by the Google Dev Library Staff

Introducing the Dev Library Contributor Spotlights – a weblog collection highlighting builders which are supporting the thriving growth ecosystem by contributing their sources and instruments to Google Dev Library.

We met with Doug Duhaime, Full Stack Developer in Yale College’s Digital Humanities Lab, to debate his ardour for Machine Studying, his processes and what impressed him to launch his PixPlot mission as an Open Supply.

What led you to discover the sphere of machine studying?

I used to be an English main in undergrad and in graduate college. I’ve a PhD in English literature. My dissertation was exploring copyright historical past and the ways in which modifications in copyright legislation affected the ebook market. How does the establishment of mounted period copyright affect the ebook market? To reply this query, I needed to mine an unlimited assortment of knowledge – half one million books, printed earlier than 1800 – to have a look at completely different patterns. That was one of many key tasks that acquired me impressed to additional discover the world of Machine Studying.

In actual fact, considered one of my tasks – the PixPlot library – makes use of pc imaginative and prescient to investigate picture collections, which was additionally partially utilized in my analysis. A part of my analysis checked out plagiarism detection and the way readily individuals are inclined to repeat photographs as soon as it turns into authorized to repeat them from different texts. Pc imaginative and prescient helps us to reply these questions and determine key patterns.

I’ve seen machine studying and programming as a approach to ask new questions in historic contexts. And there is a entire discipline of us – we’re known as digital humanists. Yale College, the place I have been for the final 5 years, has a incredible digital humanities program the place researchers are asking questions like this and utilizing enjoyable machine studying platforms like TensorFlow to reply these questions.

Are you able to inform us extra concerning the evolution of your PixPlot library mission?

We began in Yale’s digital humanities lab with a mission known as neural neighbors. And the concept right here was to search out patterns within the Meserve-Kunhardt Assortment of photographs.

Meserve-Kunhardt is a set of images largely from the nineteenth century that Yale just lately acquired. After being acquired by the college, some curators have been making ready to determine all this actually wealthy metadata to explain these photographs. Nonetheless, they’d a backlog, and so they wanted assist to attempt to make sense of what is on this assortment. And so, Neural Neighbors was our preliminary try to reply this query.

As this mission went on, we began operating up in opposition to limitations and asking larger questions. For instance, as an alternative of simply trying on the footage, what would it not be like to have a look at your complete assortment suddenly? As a way to reply this query, we wanted a extra performant rendering layer.

So we determined to make the most of TensorFlow, which allowed us to extract vector illustration of every picture. We then compressed the dimensionality of these vectors all the way down to 2D. However for PixPlot, we determined to make use of a unique dimensionality discount approach known as umap. And that introduced us to the primary launch of PixPlot.

The thought right here was to take the entire assortment, shoot it down into 2D, after which allow you to transfer by way of it and have a look at the pictures within the assortment whereby we count on photographs with related content material to be positioned shut by each other.

And so it is simply advanced from that early genesis and Neural Neighbors by way of to the place it’s at present.

What impressed you to launch PixPlot as an open supply mission?

Within the case of PixPlot, I used to be working for Yale College, and we had a aim to make as a lot of our contributions to the software program world as doable open and publicly accessible with none industrial phrases.

It was an enormous privilege to spend time with the lab and construct software program that others discovered helpful. I might say much more typically, in my private life, I actually like constructing issues that individuals discover helpful and, when doable, contributing again to the open supply world as a result of, I believe, so many people be taught from open supply.

Discover out extra content material contributed and authored by Doug Duhaime and uncover extra distinctive instruments and sources on the Google Dev Library web site!