Nates imaginarium

Feels like the gestational period for a software baby. If that’s the case we are what? the size of a grape?

Ten weeks have gone by quickly. Our Team Top-n genera classification network is coming along. I feel as though we have a good design framework and at least know how we are going to approach it. Early on for this project it was apparent that data quantity and quality was going to be a pain point. It looks like we have figured out how we are going to generate labeled training data. The problem of data imbalance is present though, some genera have a 3:1 instance factor so we are going to have to work though manually adding more data or normalizing the set. On the algorithm side we are settled on using the CNN approach first. I have to admit that learning TensorFlow is taking a lot of time and will probably occupy most of the winter break. There are a lot of things happening behind the code that is important to understand, its a very complex system. I have found the book “Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent” by Aurélien Géron very helpful.

The plan for the break is to learn the Tensorflow library better and start developing our V0.0.2 system into a proper ML system. In addition to getting the CNN working I would like to get a transformer network up and running and compare it against a CNN for spectrogram processing. I am only taking the 1 capstone class next term so it will be nice to be able to focus on the project.

Work is crazy busy. We have installed 1 of 2 evaluation tools for our new customer and the product qualification will begin soon. It has been exciting to get to this point but we have a lot of work to do. The next 6 months are really critical and there is a lot of pressure to execute.

Family wise everything is OK. The kids are busy with school and sports as usual. James is doing really well in basketball this winter and Shelby as moved up a lane in swim! Riley is content just doing things she enjoys at home. I need to figure out how to get her to branch out a little more. We also need to either clone ourselves or hire a driver, there always seems to be two or three things going on all at once and no way to get there. Next June Shelby will get her license and that will be a big help or maybe robo-taxi??

We took advantage of the government EV tax incentives before the end of the year and bought a Tesla model Y after thanksgiving. Despite knowing all too well how supervised and un-supervised learning happens, and knowing that self driving autopilot is not actual autopilot, and knowing the number of drivers trapped and killed in weird ways inside EV’s, we still bought one. As an engineer you cant help at marvel at both the hardware and software engineering that goes in to the product. My wife and I both commute 40mi round trip daily for our jobs now and we were buying so much fuel. We will see what the data and savings are after a few months. It may spawn a sub Tesla/EV blog since I love everything automotive.

Blog will resume in…..2025!

If you would have asked my 24 year old self if I though I would be in the home stretch of a CS degree, quitting my job at a major US semiconductor company, joining a semiconductor startup as the 3rd employee, and cultivating citrus, I would have laughed in your face but here we are aren’t we.

About four weeks ago I quite my job at Intel after 21 years. What a run. Its hard to encapsulate everything that has happened there for me in that time. I got married while working there, had three kids, bought two houses, had some amazing vacations, worked with the best and brightest engineers in the world, and learned a lifetime of lessons.

It was all of the above that gave me the confidence to do something totally risky and different. Having gained so much experience I can say that no matter what I did, I knew I was going to be OK. So, I took a senior hardware engineer and technical sales position at a small unknown semiconductor tooling supplier. The mission is to develop and sell etch tooling to the logic market. Namely my old employer, but also others like TSMC, TI, Micron and so forth. We are small in a big pond, but I am confident we can make some waves.

Why the heck are you doing a CS degree? Why? I wake up and ask myself this question every day. My peers, colleagues, and friends have the luxury of focusing on their professional endeavors while I return home after the day at the office, cook, go to a kids basketball practice and then sit at a computer at 9pm thinking about my life choices writing a blog. Which has actually has been mostly helpful. I think about quitting all the time.

So that’s the theme of this post. Change is the one thing you can count on. Never get used to things being the same for too long, if they are, don’t be surprised when everything gets upended.

The leads me to the project out team has been working on. We have a teams chat where we all asynchronously communicate. Van and I are about the same age and have known each other, by chance though OSU and work for a few years, we are older and have much in common. The other 4 in the team are typical students. 3 guys are pretty quiet, but I can tell are smart and full of ideas. Alex the 4th, is talkative, opinionated and tends to (try) and dominate the meetings and discussion. He is a great source of disagreement and generally forces the rest of us to defend our positions and research alternatives. What a group! I hope they all stay for the year long project.

We have a good handle on how we will do the project, and what the architecture is going to look like. We have basically divided into three sub teams who will work on components. We will host the thing on Git. Areas of contention lately are whether to use sub-repos or not. Personally, I want everyone regardless of project scope to be code reviewing everything so that means reviewing all the pull requests. If we have members leave or need urgent review any two members can review and push though changes.

We have made some good progress looking at data sets and figuring out which we might want to use. Pretty much the whole project can be coded in python so there is one area of agreement. There is some contention about cross platform compatibility and development. We will probably be implementing some kind of virtual environment so that everyone is working in the same sand box.

That’s the latest. For now I just need to stay sane and keep this project on track. Oh yeah the citrus. I love growing citrus, particularly kumquat of which I have 3 trees. I also have 2 lemon trees and a navel orange and a lime. I also have several Chinese orange (Trifoliate orange), which I have been growing from seed. Its not easy in Oregon to grow citrus. I keep in them in the garage in the winter. The care and feeding of citrus would make another good blog. Maybe by blog post number three some citrus will be ripe, winter is harvest time, and I will share some pictures!

Brief introductions:

This site is dedicated to my CS461 capstone project.

My name is Nathan Huffman I am a senior CS student at Oregon State University. In the best case scenario I will graduate sometime in 2025.

The project a group of 4 of use are considering is here . Proposed project mates are Van To, Deo Sung and Allison Karlis.

I came to OSU after about 16 years working in industry as a platform to “level up” my career. I have been mainly focused on hardware and I thought how great would it be if I understood the software workings of things as well. Anything that bridges hardware and software I find fascinating. I am taking a few mechatronics classes that I am very excited about.

I know nothing about what this project aims to achieve but I do have quite a bit of SEM knowledge. I have spent the last 21 years in the semiconductor industry. I have held a number of roles, technician, Engineer, Manager just to name a few. Recently I left my long career at a major fortune 500 company to work for a small semiconductor tooling startup. Most of my knowledge is around plasma, leading edge semiconductor construction, and semiconductor etch chamber construction.

I have been married for 19 years and have three children 15, 13, 10 years of age. My hope is that someday they might come across this blog, written by an old guy, and it offers them inspiration to keep learning and peruse their dreams no matter the stage in life.

Some interesting things and hobbies about me: Lets see, I love everything that has wheels and hacking on cars, both mechanically and on the software side. I enjoy being outside doing things with my family, hiking, fishing, boating. Nature tends to give a lot of inspiration. We have a cat, dog, 2 rabbits, 2 frogs, and a hamster!

Hopefully this will be as informative as it is entertaining. At this point success in uncertain and the the task at hand seems very difficult. I am hopeful our group will do something wonderful with our project!

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