MeFi Projects

We made some cool new machine learning models for separating birdsong in soundscape recordings, and demonstrated how to use the separated audio to improve downstream classification. The separation model is available on github, where we've also got lots more examples. There's also a paper.
posted by kaibutsu on Jan 24, 2022 - 4 comments

We just launched a machine learning competition for bird identification in soundscapes! This is a surprisingly difficult problem, which can ultimately help with ecosystem health monitoring (for example, if birds X, Y, Z are present, you can make inferences about their food and predators). I've been building models in this space for a couple of years, working with both the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Cal Academy of Sciences in my spare time. I'm excited to see what sort of ideas we get from the larger community!
posted by kaibutsu on Jun 15, 2020 - 3 comments

Inspired by this post my favorite pastime recently, when I'm feeling down or bored, has been getting GPT-2 to complete William Carlos Williams poems. I've made a tumblr where I have been posting some of my favorite completions of his classic, "This Is Just To Say."
posted by Lazlo Hollyfeld on Apr 30, 2020 - 0 comments

A couple of years ago I made a free 8-week writing course in podcast form. Starting from Jan 1st I'm releasing a new, bigger version called The 100 Day Writing Challenge. [more inside]
posted by RokkitNite on Jan 5, 2020 - 6 comments

I'm (just barely) starting to blog about data for families and households. One of the first pieces I want to do is about potty training, and there's some gaps in the existing literature that I'm hoping to address by collecting some data from parents on when and how they did potty training. If you've potty trained a child *within the past year*, and feel like sharing how it went, I would be most appreciative if you do this 5 minute survey. I'll share the results back here and at littldata.com.
posted by LadyGerbil on Feb 6, 2019 - 0 comments

I made a free 8-week fiction writing course in podcast form. [more inside]
posted by RokkitNite on Feb 2, 2018 - 5 comments

Last time, I trained an LSTM neural network to generate British placenames. This time, I trained one on Ask Metafilter questions to see if the questions it generated might tell us anything about humanity. (Spoilers: yes, of course it did). [more inside]
posted by danhon on Aug 3, 2017 - 12 comments

Last year, Oscar Sharp and I made the short-film Sunspring in just two days for the Sci-Fi-London 48 Hour Film Contest. It was (so far as we know) the first film created from a computer-generated screenplay [1,2,3,4]. This year, Oscar and I followed up on Sunspring with a new short film created for the same contest: It's No Game, starring David Hasselhoff. See the accompanying article in Ars Technica for more details. (Rather than generating the screenplay in its entirety, this time we used our neural nets as augmentative writing tools to generate short snippets of dialogue in various styles. )
posted by TheMadStork on Apr 25, 2017 - 1 comment

I have been teaching myself Yiddish, mostly using the sort of brute-force, memorize 1,000 words using smart flashcards techniques offered up by various hacky "hack the language" web gurus. And it's been working surprisingly well. At the end of three months, I could understand between 70 percent and 80 percent of every headline I read in the Yiddish Foreward, and, in general, I am more comfortable with the Yiddish I have learned since I started than I am with the Hebrew I spent 12 years studying. [more inside]
posted by maxsparber on Apr 28, 2016 - 0 comments

The Learning and Technology Library is an online digital library of over 100,000 journal articles, conference papers, ebooks, and dissertation abstracts all focused on the use of technology in learning and education. [more inside]
posted by Deathalicious on Feb 17, 2016 - 0 comments

Long time reader, first time poster. My friend and I are trying to learn Swedish as quickly as possible using online tools. We started in the middle of December and are almost done studying. We've contacted a grad student at a local university and he's going to test us on our ability to speak Swedish. We have a few posts up (including a review of language tools!) and would love to hear your thoughts or feedback. Wish us (or me) luck on the test!
posted by carlsjuniorweathers on Jan 15, 2016 - 1 comment

LogicProblems.org is a propositional logic solving/learning application aimed towards students who wish to practice deriving conclusions from a set of assumptions in an interactive manner, for example deriving (A&B)→C from the assumption A→(B→C). It was created for my better half, with the aid of her invaluable input, who teaches Propositional Logic at a local community college. Her students have been using it for around 2 years now and tend to find it useful. In the past year I added an achievement system to try and make the subject a bit more engaging, so if you're the type of person who loves badges you may enjoy this application! [more inside]
posted by localhuman on Dec 13, 2015 - 5 comments

My six year old son needed some extra motivation to practice reading and writing this summer, so we built a video game. Now, we're tracking visits and viewing them on a map to talk about geography. Please delight him by checking it out! [more inside]
posted by banjonaut on Aug 18, 2015 - 11 comments

Kids can spin the wheel to hear words and songs across 11 different themes. It's aimed at pre-school kids as a fun way to learn new words in English, Spanish or Mandarin Chinese. [more inside]
posted by Gomez_in_the_South on Jul 21, 2015 - 2 comments

I work in maps but am generally frustrated with the way the field is taught: so this is my attempt at making educational materials that dial down the corporate tie-ins and talk about concept. I also write about the process of making it and am planning on illustrating & printing it for free/cheap for students.
posted by tmcw on Jan 9, 2014 - 3 comments

This a site I created as a hobby, to help my own self-study in Japanese, inspired by a trip to Japan last year. If you signup, it'll send you a regular translation assignment by email, with a sentence in Japanese to translate into English (and, as a friend pointed out, there was no reason not to allow the reverse, so you can also choose to get sentences in English and translate those into Japanese). [more inside]
posted by dpapathanasiou on Jan 17, 2013 - 0 comments

I had to speak 4/5 languages for my job, and in the process of learning them, I've landed on a pretty solid language learning method that brought me to fluency (C1) in French in 5 months, with about an hour/day time investment. This website shows you how to do the same!
posted by sdis on Mar 18, 2012 - 2 comments