Scale By The Bay 2018: Tongfei Chen Interview
Recording: Scale By The Bay 2018: Tongfei Chen Interview
I'm Tom fetch and I'm a PhD candidate from Johns Hopkins University working on artificial intelligence and natural language processing mine was booting I was winning on my own side project kind of a type save deep learning framework first kata apart you know there's a lot of deep learning Meccans right now there are a lot of libraries like tensorflow pi torch whatever these things are all usually in Python and they they are not really type safe to use you will people would get into type errors all the time spending hours or days figuring out the dimensions of the tensors or whatever so these are actually I think it's quite hard to reason and to maintain this Python code so I've been talking this to a bunch of people they all share the same sentiments so I started to build a completely typesafe tensor operation library in Scala and with deep learning capabilities so that the program would be very easy to follow and to maintain it's an very declarative and yes [Music] my talk isn't the data thing but I am probably more interested in a functional thing yeah I I believe that functional programming seems more elegant way to go I hope to share some kind of to use static typing and to prove that your program is correct before running things yeah - to be more on a static and functional side instead of the people doing it dynamically and people write tests I don't think that's a very productive way I'm hoping to learn here some kind of a pure referential a transparent IO techniques and like those kind of things I I don't have enough experience on my own but I would like to learn from these talks gear [Music] um I first started using Scala four years ago when I was in a senior undergrad I was trying to abstract over floats and doubles or in son Long's and shorts and bytes and that time I I entered the world of typeless of type classes and and implicit mechanism in Scala so it at that time it seems that the only language that can do this properly and I can interoperate with Java so that's the life-changing moment for me so yeah so I think I owe everything to Eric Oh Shane who's the original author of spire that's the thing that draws me just go further things is there I think the talks are very interesting here these are encompassing a lot of areas in programming you you have like consensus consensus algorithms you have distributed things you have machine learning everything and you see this scholars being a general-purpose language that has I think has the power and for all of these and and you see that Scala is a superior solution to a lot of these problems [Music]