A Hands-on Introduction to TensorFlow and Machine Learning

Abhay Kashyap, UMBC ebiquity Lab

10:00-11:00am Tuesday, 28 March 2017, ITE346 ITE325b

As many of you know, TensorFlow is an open source machine learning library by Google which simplifies building and training deep neural networks that can take advantage of computers with GPUs. In this meeting, I will introduce some basic concepts of TensorFlow and machine learning in general. This will be a hands on tutorial where we will sit and code up some basic examples in TensorfFow. Specifically, we will use TensorFlow to implement linear regression, softmax classifiers and feed forward neural networks (MLP). You can find the Python notebooks here. If time permits, we will go over the implementation of the popular word2vec algorithm and introduce LSTMs to build language models.

What you need to know: Python and the basics of linear algebra and matrix operations. While it helps to know basics of machine learning, no prior knowledge will be assumed and there will be a gentle high level introduction to the algorithms we will implement.

What you need to bring: A laptop that has Python and pip installed. Having virtual environments set up on your computer is also a plus. (Warning: Windows-only users might be publicly shamed)