"No one is harder on a talented person than the person themselves" - Linda Wilkinson ; "Trust your guts and don't follow the herd" ; "Validate direction not destination" ;

September 26, 2020

My perspective of interview discussions

Interviews are becoming more complex to evaluate candidates. Every candidate has their own strengths/weakness. We need to identify the strength of the candidate throughout the discussion. My approach is to discuss the projects/domains and understand perspectives.

  • How much they have solved a use case end to end
  • What learning resources/techniques/papers were leveraged
  • Data Science models were built
  • What are the dataset challenges/data collection/accuracy issues?
  • Was it deployed / what were learning's
  • How the end goal/metrics were evaluated

I still find it hard to remembers the best case / worst case for sort/search / B+ tree after 20 years. I don't really evaluate candidates based on MCQ questions. There are too many facts which google query can return in milliseconds. 

In the process of interviews, we are looking at candidates on solving use cases, looking at design perspectives from implementation perspectives, think ahead from all aspects, technical and domain-based learning. Good communication alone cannot identify what you say vs what you actually know. We need to walk through, discuss, and understand each other perspectives to arrive at the clarity of thoughts, communication, ideas, and learning.

Being empathetic, open-minded, patient listener, few basic questions on each concept to know its theoretical vs insightful vs implementation knowledge can provide clarity on the candidate's perspectives of learning/awareness.

More Reads

6 Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60+ Technical Interviews in 30 Days

Keep Thinking!!!

September 20, 2020

Great Talk - SaaS Startup Opportunity

 


Beautiful Thoughts from KissFlow CEO
  • Algorithmic AI is a commodity
  • Data is the differentiator
  • SaaS - Next Best Opportunity
  • 1X revenue - 10X valuation for startups
  • Services 1X revenue - 3X value / profits
  • 15K SaaS professionals in Chennai
  • Zoho = 5X of Freshworks
This slide from Telegram groups gave a different perspective of building products/solutions

Startup Advice

  • Net Revenue Retention = (Renewal month to month recurring revenue + Expansion month to month recurring revenue - Churn monthly recurring revenue - Downgrade monthly recurring revenue) / Beginning Monthly recurring revenue
  • Gross Revenue Retention = (Renewal Monthly recurring revenue - Churn monthly recurring revenue - Downgrade monthly recurring revenue) / Beginning monthly recurring revenue
  • Customer Churn = (Initial Customer Count - Churned Customer count)/ Initial Customer Count
  • Customer Acquisition Cost = Sales Spend + Marketing Spend
  • Retention Margins = (Top Line Revenue - Cost of Revenue - Customer Service and Success Costs) / Top Line Revenue
Keep Thinking!!!

September 18, 2020

Interesting Startup - Wesense

Wesense has always been my favorite. A very good session on the product, architecture

  • AI through IoT
  • Situational Awareness
  • Smart Cameras, Self Driving, Cars
  • Videos - Sequences of frames 
  • Detections, tracking through frame for Vision Apps

Vision Apps

  • People Counting
  • Features + Face Registered
  • Customer Attribute Tracking (Glasses)
  • In Class Emotions Tracking / Participation score
  • Dispensed Cups
  • Key Dispensing kit
  • Key - Car Mapping - OCR + Extraction








Production Stack
  • Remote SSH Provider
  • Onboard GPU
  • Tracking Area Identified for each camera
  • Meta data inside a region
  • Notification Systems
  • Camera Positioning
  • Multiple camera sync
  • Object reidentification with redis 
  • Occlusion - Multiple cameras
  • Intel openvino tensorflow
  • Heavier inference on cloud
  • Lighter inference on edge device
  • Age and Gender model on cloud
  • Focal Length of Camera, Height and other customer identifiers to match
  • Batch processing on edge (patented)
  • Preprocessing to determine which one is processed
  • Determine which frames to be picked up
  • Not running all models on all time
  • CCTV much better than drones on few cases outdoor monitoring
  • Team to label data
  • 1.5 years to reach this level of accuracy














Happy Learning!!! 

September 09, 2020

Railway Track Maintenance - Vision paper reads

Paper #1 - Vision-Based Railway Track Monitoring Using Deep Learning

Key Notes

  • Vision models to detect sunkinks, loose ballast and railway assets like switches and signals

Models Analysis

  • Inception - 2015 - Instead of stacking convolutional layers in a sequential manner, if convolutions with different filter sizes can be processed in parallel and then concatenated and fed to next layer
  • ResNet - 2015 - Inputs of a lower layer are added to the inputs of a higher layer due to which higher layers make inference based on both the extracted feature maps and the original inputs
  • FRCNN - Region proposal method to identify bounding boxes with highest probability

Defects

Loose Ballast - A track is identified as having loose ballast when it doesn’t have enough gravel distributed in between tracks making depth of cross ties visible


Sunkink -  model just needs to identify if the tracks are almost straight and parallel or not. Rail malformations known as a "sun kink" or "track buckle“


Steps

  • (A) ROI IN THE FRAME, 
  • (B) IMAGE AFTER PERSPECTIVE TRANSFORMED WITH GAUGE MEASUREMENTS FROM PROCESSED FRAME 
  • (C) PROCESSED ROI
  • (D) AND (E) TRAINING IMAGES SIMULATED IN PAINT, 
  • (F) SUNKINK BEING DETECTED IN A VIDEOFIGURE 4 

Signal Color - Once the signal is detected, red and green color masks are applied on the image part inside the predicted bounding box to identify signal color. 

Track Health Index - All the track defects that can be identified will be given a weightage based on their severity

Paper #2 - Railway Track Specific Traffic Signal Selection Using Deep Learning

Key Notes

  • Challenges - Urban areas, multiple lines run in parallel
  • Approach - position of signal is highly dependent on the position of the current track relative to the other tracks present.
  • FRCNN model was used for signal detection and color detection was added on top of it.

Paper #3 - Holistically-Nested Edge Detection

Key Notes

  • End-to-end edge detection system
  • Canny Edge Draw back - exhibit spatial shift and inconsistency.
  • Recent Architectures - [10], DeepContour [34], DeepEdge [2], and CSCNN [19].

HED

  • CNN for patch-based edge prediction
  • Structured Edges (SE) - incorporating structural information,  fusing multi-scale responses
  • End-to-end edge detection system, a strategy inspired by fully convolutional neural networks 
  • Multi-scale deep learning into four categories, namely, multi-stream learning, skip-net learning, a single model running on multiple inputs, and training of independent networks.

Techniques to Improve Signal - Noise in Image

  • Gray conversion 
  • Histogram equalization
  • Binary Image 
  • Classification Custom Model

Issues

  • Crack in a track
  • Rivets in a track

Ref - Link

Paper #4 - Automatic Detection of Objects of Interest from Rail Track Images

Keynotes

  • Powerful, smaller and cheaper, automatic visual inspection systems

Detects the locations of the fasteners in an input rail track image

This system should be able to detect various objects such as fastening elements (bolts, insulated block joints, clamps, clips, etc.) by inspecting the images acquired by a digital camera installed under a diagnostic train.

  • Traditional Techniques
  • Ultrasound inspection

Magnetic methods, such as eddy current inspection, magnetic particle inspection (MPI), magnetic induction, magnetic flux leakage (MFL), electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT)

  • Ground penetrating radar (GPR)
  • Laser light inspection
  • Infrared inspection
  • X-ray inspection
  • Spectral analysis of surface waves (SASW)
  • Impact-echo techniques
  • Impulse-response techniques

Approach

  • Feature extraction algorithm, and then provided to a classifier.


Happy Learning!!!

September 08, 2020

Data Science how long its going to be there ?

I observe a lot of mad rush on data science from every segment, freshers, experienced. Intentions are more like get into the field, grab an offer. 

  • In 2000, these terms are alien - NoSQL, BigData, Cloud.
  • The technology tools/trends from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook gave us Kafka, Lambda architecture, Spark, and more real-time tools evolving in the Big Data Landscape
  • In 2010, the trending things were Hadoop, Bigdata, NoSQL, I have observed this wave translating into Data Lake, Data Platforms
  • Imagenet set the trend for sight on Vision, Plantir many other startups were quietly working on Data Science (Data, Text, Video different components) long before.
  • Now in 2020, You see Data Science, Data Lakes, Cloud, Docker, SAAS, PAAS

In a way these tools simplify a lot of development stack, in the end, the system does run somewhere and the underlying tasks are done by the provider. Data Science will converge into something else. Picking a hot technology may not give you the best returns unless you like what you can do with that technology.

Money is a driver, passion is much more impactful in the long run. 

Keep Thinking!!!

September 02, 2020