Hands-on with Fast.ai

Hands on with Fast.ai automatically sort text or images with machine-learning, with Jeremy Merrill.

• Got too much text to read, or too many images to dig through? Make the computer do it, by teaching by example.
• We’ll sort images into categories like “has a bike or doesn’t have a bike” or “is a hog farm or isn’t a hog farm”.
• We’ll sort text into buckets like “is about gun control, environmental policy or immigration”.
• The goal isn’t for the computer to make uncheckable conclusions you’ll rely on in a story, but an easily-checkable conclusion to transform a boring week-long slog into a few hours of data labelling, some coding and a little bit of waiting.
• You’ll leave with two hands-on examples and working code you can adapt for your own projects, but also intuitions about what the AI’s output means to us as journalists.