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# System prepended metadata

title: Rust ML WG Meeting 00008

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# Rust ML WG Meeting 00008

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## 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