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14 posts tagged with "machine learning"

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· 11 min read
Adrian Png

A flagger stopping a truck on a remote dessert highway.

In case you missed it, for the last few blogs posts, I had been using Stability AI's Stable Diffusion model to generate the banner images, and I have been mostly successful. Did I really need to? Perhaps not. For this post, I spent almost 30 minutes trying to figure out the "right" prompt to generate the image I wanted: "A car stopped in front a stop sign."

· 13 min read
Adrian Png

Photo of a robot ruling the planet.

A new year, a new product! Yesterday, Oracle announced the general availability of the OCI Generative AI (GenAI) service. In my final blog post last year, I briefly looked at the beta information that was available to the public, and suggested how you can quite easily add powerful GenAI capability in Oracle APEX applications by calling the REST APIs using APEX_WEB_SERVICE. With the service in GA, I am now finally able to take a deeper dive and hopefully, help you get started.

· 13 min read
Adrian Png

A beautiful winter sunrise in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada.

In the last one year since OpenAI popularised generative AI, a lot of the excitement and intrigue have been centred on the generative power of large language models (LLMs) or foundational models. Understandably so. However, the generative power of this models only cover a segment of business needs. The underlying promise of these frontier models is in its ability to "understand" natural language, and that to me, is where we will find more utility.

For the last few years at Insum, we've had an almost biannual tradition of reviewing what's been going on in the AI/ML space, in particular, around what Oracle has been doing to provide innovative solutions and tools. If you missed those, I have provided the links below. In the absence of an updated review, I am hoping that this final 2023 blog post would serve somewhat as a stopgap.

· 11 min read
Adrian Png

Photo of a bird perched on a tree, generated using a Stability Diffusion model.

In my previous post, you read about how I performed fine-tuning and deployed a large language model (LLM) on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Science service. Here, I was hoping to do the same with the Stable Diffusion XL, a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM), but unfortunately, the platform currently does not support a Hugging Face pipeline using this model. I found an alternative, and you will read about it later in this article.

To demonstrate its utility, I create a simple Oracle APEX application that reads NFC tags using the experimental Web NFC API, and then displays an image generated by the deployed machine learning (ML) model.

· 10 min read
Adrian Png

LLMs for analyzing customer reviews.

In my previous post, I wrote about how a scikit-learn machine learning (ML) could be trained and deployed on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Science service. The model is deployed on the service's managed infrastructure, allowing developers to simply call a HTTP endpoint to perform ML model inference on the submitted data. In my latest adventure, I built an Oracle APEX application that takes product reviews and then automatically ranks the review using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) available through Hugging Face.

· 4 min read
Adrian Png

Woman in a crystal ball

This has been one of those weeks where I couldn't wait to wake up and get to work. Just last week, Luc Demanche threw me a challenge and asked that I help develop an Oracle APEX application that could be used to predict the winner of the Rugby World Cup 2023 (RWC2023). I couldn't resist the challenge!

· 7 min read
Adrian Png

A woman speaking to an Oracle.

One of the key highlights at Oracle Cloudworld 2023 is general availability of Select AI feature that allows anyone to query the Oracle Database using natural language. This is likely made possible with a template wrapping the database metadata with the prompt, and then calling either the OpenAI or Cohere APIs to generate the intended text.

· 8 min read
Adrian Png

Black Star Line Stock Certificate

Doug Gault had suggested a while ago that I could bring more awareness to the Oracle APEX Challenge Coin project if I had an Oracle APEX application that plots the location of each sponsored coin on a world map. I agree. However, aside from a lack of time, I had also wanted to find interesting ways for awardees to submit their claim of ownership. Over the last week, I had worked on making this dream of a "claims" map a reality with the use of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Vision AI service, more specifically, its custom model training feature.

Here's an early preview of the claims process in the Claim My Oracle APEX Challenge Coin application.

· 11 min read
Adrian Png

I'm finally finding more time, post-conference, to catch up on my writing. In this latest post, I'd like to talk about a presentation that I did at Kscope23, "Solving Everyday Problems with the Oracle Cloud". During the session, I had described and demonstrated how we can use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI services and Oracle APEX to build compelling solutions, even for personal life challenges.

· 16 min read
Adrian Png

A cassette tape.

When I was first introduced to generative adversarial networks (GANs), I was impressed, but yet not impressed. The concept, performance, and outcomes of these advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms were truly jaw-dropping, but easily abused. And so, when everyone was excitedly chatting about ChatGPT, I was cynical and tried to tune out until I came across a comment by an old acquaintance, following a news article on concerns about ChatGPT and potential plagiarism in school.

It's like someone using a calculator in an arithmetic exam, ChatGPT is just another tool.

-- Sau Sheong Chang

That statement got me rethinking my stance on the technology, and curious about its utility in my day-to-day job.

· 4 min read
Adrian Png

"Welcome" in multiple languages.

It's been too long since I last posted anything on my blog. Thanks to Tim Hall, I am writing again, after a long pause, to celebrate Joel Kallman Day 2022. My contribution today is about my deep appreciation for the team behind the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI Services. Below is a quick scoop on how I have used these services to improve on my OCI-powered e-flashcard for learning new words in a different language. I will be doing a quick demonstration (session LRN3673) of this work at the upcoming Oracle CloudWorld 2022.

· 9 min read
Adrian Png

Neurons

During a recent Kscope21 session, "Predict Customer Churn Using Oracle Autonomous Database, Machine Learning, and APEX", I had shared that it has always been my personal desire to create web applications that are not only purposeful, but also have an element of "intelligence". With new features recently introduced in the Oracle Machine Learning product offering, it is now relatively easy to introduce ML as a component of your Oracle Application Express (APEX) applications. This is the first of several posts that I am writing as a follow up to the presentations I did at this year's (virtual) conference.

· 6 min read
Adrian Png

Figuring out sentiments.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a great platform in many ways. However, as much as I love it, I have long griped about the lack of out-of-the-box support for AI services that many of Oracle's competitors have. Well, as of May 6, 2021, I am glad to see that things are starting to turn around with the launch of the OCI Language service.

· 3 min read
Adrian Png

I was very excited to get my hands on a copy of Mahout in Action. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are my most favourite subjects in Computer Science. Back during my school days, AI and ML were primarily used in research, and sometimes banks use them for fraud detection. I am glad that it is gradually being adopted in mainstream businesses with the help of easy to use frameworks like Mahout, backed by commodity distributing platforms like Hadoop.