Finbarr Timbers

Hi, I'm Finbarr Timbers (it's Irish). I live in Canada and work as a Data Scientist at Darkhorse Analytics, a boutique consulting firm.

I'm the technical lead for all predictive modelling projects. Most of my work involves machine learning. Lately I've been focusing more on image recognition & NLP using deep neural networks.

I do work as a machine learning consultant outside of Darkhorse, and I'm always looking for new projects. More information here.

I read a lot, and list the books I like here.

Posts

Do deep networks generalise or just memorise? 4 July 2017
Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts layer 1 July 2017
Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour 20 June 2017
Tests make you write down your assumptions 5 March 2017
Random Search for Hyper-Parameter Optimization 1 March 2017
How I designed my machine learning app 21 February 2017
Securing yourself against online tracking 4 February 2017
Useful Bash One-liners 20 January 2017
Including web fonts in RMarkdown 19 January 2017
A Deep Hierarchical Approach to Lifelong Learning in Minecraft 3 January 2017
Larry Ellison on consulting costs 6 December 2016
SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5mb model size 10 November 2016
Conditional image synthesis with auxiliary classifier GANs 8 November 2016
Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning 8 November 2016
Minimal example of how to do model selection in Python 26 October 2016
Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives 20 October 2016
Full Resolution Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks 19 October 2016
Generative Adversarial Networks and Actor-Critic methods 19 October 2016
Using simulated data to train robots 18 October 2016
Safe and Efficient Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning 18 October 2016
XGBoost: A scalable tree boosting system 20 September 2016
Excellent description of how hashtables work 15 August 2015
Full example for using JSONcpp on Unix 6 September 2014
ARIMA, ARMA, what's the difference? 21 April 2014
Solving Partial Autocorrelation Functions 3 March 2014

Projects

www.BugDedupe.com

I turned my academic research into a SaaS app that automatically analysed & deduplicate bug reports. Unfortunately, it was too expensive for me to keep running, but I have the code & can deploy it with a few hours work.

If anyone's interested in using this at their company, I'd love to talk to you.

Automated textual analysis for bug report deduplication

A system that automatically detects duplicate bug reports.

Talks

A talker on Docker: How containers can make your work more reproducible, accessible, and ready for production

Edmonton Data Science Meetup. Edmonton, AB, October 5th, 2016.

Slides: PDF.

Automating your work away: One consulting firm's experience using KnitR

UseR! 2016, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Tuesday, June 28th, 2016.

Slides: HTML, PDF, Video.

Work Experience

ML Engineer/Data Scientist, Darkhorse Analytics

Used my background in academic research to come up with highly scalable algorithms based on machine learning to solve our clients needs. Solutions were typically based on the state of the art academic literature.