It's new years eve and - as always - I try to finish some things and have some plans for next year.
Review of 2016
This year was pretty awesome. I went to a summer school in Greifswald where I got to know a lot of nice people. I participated in a wind surfing and in a sailing course. I hiked the GR 20, finished my first via ferrata (Alpspitz-Ferrata), went to the Salewa-Klettersteig and the Tegelberg Klettersteig near Füssen.
In July, I got to know Bouldering and managed to finish the first Fb 6c - 7b routes. However, only routes up to 5c are always easy for me (see table with climbing grades and wiki article).
In December, I've got the chance to go to NIPS 2016
Here are some other mentionable facts:
- ML-KA is still active.
- I have 15 838 points on StackOverflow and reached 5.1 million people with my posts (source).
- I wrote 53 articles for this blog (including this one) in 2016. A couple of them might be interesting for a very specific audience (SVMs, classifier comparison, machine learning glossary).
- I've uploaded 835 files to Wikipedia Commons in 2016 (source). My uploads to Wikipedia Commons are about 3 GiB in total now. On commons, I made 4414 edits in total.
Old year resolutions
- ✔ 05.02.2016: Sold my old vacuum cleaner
- ✔ 17.02.2016: Quit church
- ✔ 08.05.2016: Migrate Blog to Pelican
- ✔ 14.04.2016: Contact BSI, BKA, CCC and the car sellers and send them my paper in which I summarize current problems in car security. (Later, I found this. Coincidence?)
- ✔ 01.11.2016: I got rid of my old bed.
- ✔ 03.11.2016: I painted some walls in my appartment (not all, though).
I failed to get all my stuff from my father to my place. However, most of it is here now. Also, I didn't find new slippers.
Old year predictions
Machine Learning and Technology
- Networks will get deeper. Currently about 8 layers is usual; I expect this to get to over 30 layers.
Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition has networks with over 1000 layers. ✔ - First hacks / funny results by people abusing the fact that machine learning is used will appear.
Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day, /r/howhot ✔ - Machines will generate "high" resolution images of at least 256 × 256
pixels.
StackGANs generate 256 px × 256 px images ✔ - Speech synthesis will fastly improve. To benchmark this, I will use the original quotation that explained the importance of towels is found in Chapter 3 of Adams' work The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. See Towel Day, Google Translate Recording, Festival Recording ✗
- ALPHABET INC. (C) (GOOGLE) shares at Frankfurt Stock Exchange will go up to
about 900 Euro sometime in the year (currently, it is at 690 Euro).
✗ It only went up to 760 Euro. - Solar Roadways will make some tiny
advances.
✗ Very, very, tiny updates.
About Me
- One of my papers will get cited at least 5 times. ✗
- I will spend at least 2 weeks abroad.
Done: My trip to Corsica was a bit longer than 2 weeks. Then 10 days in Barcelona. - I will publish at leat 40 articles on my blog.
Done: 53 articles. - I will get a 90 days streak on GitHub (currently, my longest is
43 days).
Failed - I will get 15 000 points on StackExchange (see StackExchange profile)✔
Politics
- The European Union will
still exist and Britain will still be part of it
(see Brexit).
Correct (Yes, they voted for Brexit. But currently they are still part of the EU. And I doubt they will really quit the EU.) - Donald Trump will be the republican candidate and Hillary Clinton the
democrat candidate.
I was right about this. - The republican candidate will get president. Correct
- More mass shootings in the US and terrorist attacks all over the world will happen. Correct
- Grüne and SPD will still be in Baden-Württemberg (see Landtagswahl in Baden-Württemberg 2016).
False: Grüne and CDU.
New year resolutions
The plans for my new year are:
- [ ] Get all my stuff from my fathers apartment to my room. I've already packed most of it in boxes (In total: 1.00m (+0.30m?) × 0.39m × 0.60m by 4 boxes)
- [ ] Get new slippers
- [ ] Finish my masters degree
- [ ] Participate in a Flashmob
- [ ] Get comfortable with Orange Bouldering routes (5c-6c) and finish at least 5 harder ones (6c - 7b)
- [ ] Visit a country I haven't been to before.
Finishing things
I always do some cleanup before the new year begins. This means especially cleaning my computer stuff of unnecessary trash.
- ✔ Deleting several hundret E-mails.
- ✔ Clean up my smartphones TODO list.
- [ ] Clean up my notes.
- [ ] Clean up my Desktop / Download folder.
- [ ] Make Backup of Facebook (tutorial), Google+ and Gmail (takeout), Twitter (tutorial), WhatsApp (tutorial), Amazon, Banking.
- ✔ Push git stuff
Predictions for 2017
Machine Learning and Technology
- Networks will not get deeper (currently: about 600 layers, max 2000 layers), but work about how to get the same accuracy with less parameters / FLOPs will be written.
- GANs will be able to create 1024px x 1024px images.
- An AI will play Star Craft and at least one nice video of it will be online.
About Me
- I will publish at least two papers (one will be my masters thesis)
- I will finish my masters degree.
- I will publish at least 40 articles on my blog.
- I will get at least 20 000 points on StackOverflow (see StackExchange profile)
Politics
- The European Union will still exist and Britain will still be part of it, although somebody will be going in front of curt because of it (see Brexit).
- German elections: 35% for CDU/CSU, 18% for SPD, 15% for AfD, 9% for Grüne, 9% Linke.
- Trump will not build a complete wall to Mexico.