# Rust ML WG Meeting 00008

[](https://hackmd.io/Ak6goMjyQiODXO8y3lbXBg)

## Meeting Info

Date: 20200811

Start time: 1600 ET

Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/96310195426
- Meeting ID: 963 1019 5426

## Agenda
- chris m is working on a new draft of the working group's Github `rust-ml/wg` repository README, to better reflect what's actually happening
- Would like some input on those ideas

- Request for people to add/update the [Task Board](https://github.com/rust-ml/wg/blob/master/Task_Board.md)
- Is this still something that people find useful, and/or do people actually know about it?

- Archiving the GitHub "Discussion" repository, and suggesting further discussion on GH of WG stuff be conducted in issues of the `wg` repository.
- Generally, the group's GH account is kind of messy, with a few dead repositories that might make sense to archive.

## Participants

- Chrism
- tiberio ferreira
- degausser
- Paul K

## Minutes

### New `rust-ml/wg/README.md`

- new draft is up https://github.com/rust-ml/wg/pull/3
- We went through the new changes and made some comments on the PR

#### Linfa 0.2

- after that announce Working Group in some forums or This Week in Rust to get more interest/help from other people
- close to a release on this
- we should make sure the chat, repos, and READMEs are all up-to-date before annoucements on this

##### Where to talk about Linfa

- Reddit r/Rust && r/machinelearning;
- This Week in Rust
- https://users.rust-lang.org/
- Maybe post on internals
- Discord post on Linfa and the Working Group

### Discussion Archival

- Yeah let's archive it
- An ongoing issue for issues with the group (meta issues)
- also archive the classical-discussion repo, and the nlp-discussion repo

### Task Board

- Ricky- Likes it, but we should focus on updating it more
- Chrism- agrees, we should update it more

### Tsuga

- Completed benchmarking recently
- activation functions for the layers as parallel operations
- slows things down for MNIST 15% overhead as a parallel process
- tested on MNIST dataset
- MNIST crate (https://github.com/davidMcneil/mnist)
- converts array to ndarray
- 3.5s 92% acc
- acc on 3-layer network gets to about 97%
- strong points for Tsuga
- code is more readable
- uses simple datastructures
- 32-bit 2D inputs
- forward and back pass code is ~20LoC
- scales through layers
- don't have to hardcode layer numbers
- likes the way API works for creating and training networks
- often unlooked in ML
- especially in Rust
- working on new much more complicated dataset
- [CIFAR-10](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar.html)
- ~44% accuracy right now
- developed crate to parse the CIFAR-10 binaries
- https://github.com/quietlychris/cifar-10
- Add to the rust-ml repository?

### Linfa 0.2 Roadmap and Updates
- Adding algorithms
- both they are working on won't block 0.2
- more critical to have updated README
- how much more do they want for 0.2?
- Luca has set the current Roadmap, and no issues broken out for them
- should have good first issues before hand for new contributors
- contributor guide
- guide for what they are doing with the API
- no firm idea of what the API should look like
- however, there are patterns emerging
- Issue templates and CI
- how much polishing should take place before 0.2 happens
- README, contributor guide, roadmap updates (at least some), and good first issues
- before 0.2

## Actions

- Archive repositories (discussion, classical-discussion, nlp-discussion)
- Possibly have a blog on arewelearningyet.com
- post about tsuga successes
- relook at MIT licenses?
- what is everyone else using that **isn't** MIT or Apache2.0
- machine learning can be used for evil easily so how do put good effort to stop that
- Ricky and Chris take a look at the linfa documentation
- Code coverage help with linfa CI?
- direct message with owner of the tool on Zulip