I recently finished listening to Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything as an audiobook. It aligns nicely with the Exploration for this week on Game Changers. I originally picked up the book after hearing a podcast interview with McGonigal. I’ve wanted to write a science fiction novel…

Last week, I wrote about setting up a Google Cloud Storage bucket. This week, I’m writing about how to access the files in your bucket. Once you have a Google Cloud Storage bucket set up, you can access it through the browser. This is an easy way to upload and download files and folders from…

For our Top-n Music Genre Classification Neural Network project, we are using the Free Music Archive (FMA) dataset. It has Creative Commons licensed audio files in a 30 second mp3 format stored in 4 zip files of varying sizes. Our team is starting with the fma_small dataset, which has 8000 tracks and moving on to…

Last week, I wrote about forward propagation in a basic neural network. This week, I’m going to cover back propagation and gradient descent. To keep it simple, I’m not going to dive deeply into the math, but I will describe it in very rudimentary terms. Let’s do a quick recap of forward propagation in training…

For our capstone project, my group is creating a neural network model to classify an audio clip by its musical genre. So, if we are given a 30 second sample of a song, the model should be able to determine if the song is Classical or Hip-Hop or Heavy-Metal. I have written some simple machine…

This is a continuation of last week’s post. Last week I wrote about the self-promotion skills I learned as an actor that could apply to getting a job in any field. I left out networking because when I started writing, I found I had a lot to say about it. For me, networking was the…

I avoid chatty salespeople and wince at flashing marketing techniques. I am not immune to all advertising, as I often succumb to green-washing and “natural” products, but I roll my eyes when the latest New Yorker (an annual gift from my mom) is filled with Rolex or Hermes ads. I have no interest in a…

Hello! I’m Sydney and I live in Vancouver, BC. We are going to start with a game! As a recovering game-grinch, I understand if you’re rolling your eyes right now. I’ve been listening to an audiobook that suggests we all benefit from playing games, so in the spirit of our instructor’s ice-breaker game, I will…