My courses have started again, it’s so good to get back into the material. A lot of lectures and notes to get through. Getting up to speed on Haskell for Functional Programming, and getting to grips with vector based mathematics in Python with Numpy. The AI course has started with Algorithms (always a solid place to start), and this next week we’re implementing Q-learning for the Reinforcement Learning course. I’m really waiting for the coursework to be released so I can knock those down as quickly as possible.

The most important decision I have coming up is picking my dissertation topic. There’s a good range of topics, I’m leaning towards something in machine learning, particularly as a means of expanding into an area that I don’t have any courses directly on. The options are either related to object detection for satellite imagery, identification of devices based on behaviour, or something in natural language processing. I have absolutely no background in any of these so they seem like great challenges to pick.

It’s pretty cold and gross outside so I haven’t been getting much exercise. I’ve been meaning to run more, I think I’ll set some kind of goal there for distance and start moving on that. Really missing being around friends, but the vaccine news looks more positive every day. We’ll only see with time.

Reading list