Tap into the hive mind with your audience and train a deep convolutional neural network live on stage.

I use this during presentations to illustrate to the basic process of (supervised) machine learning and give the audience a feel of how much (or how little) data is needed for training.

For the Kaggle Dogs vs. Cats dataset you get about 90% accuracy in about 250 user annotations. With 25 people in your audience this typically takes less than one minute!

More information about the design and architecture can be found in this HackerNoon article on Medium:
Deep Hive: Deep learning live on stage

The application has two main parts:

This is the live dashboard displayed on the presentation screen

Your audience will visit the annotation page to do some annotations

A pretty simple model is used:

• VGG16 backbone
• GlobalAveragePooling2D
• Dense (256)
• Dropout
• Dense (size is number of classes)

• Python (python 3 only)
• Keras (tensorflow)
• Flask
• Redis
• React.js
• D3.js
• Webpack

1. Download the train.zip file from Kaggle Dogs vs. Cats dataset

2. Unzip it in the data directory. It should create a train folder

3. Preprocess the images using

   python preprocess.py data/train data/catsdogs
   

You can use your own dataset. The model is a classifier so the application expects the folders in the data directory to have the names of the classes. Specify the data directory with IMAGE_PATH in the Config.py file,

The application needs the images to be in a fixed size (default is 128x128). You can use the preprocess.ipynb notebook to rescale the images to the preferred size.

To change the url displayed for the audience on the dashboard edit the short_url parameter in src/config.json file and recompile the frontend (see Frontend section).

The easiest way to run this application is via docker.

You can start all needed containers locally by running:

docker-compose up

When docker is running, the dashboard can be found at:
http://localhost:5000/dashboard

And the annotation interface at:
http://localhost:5000/

To run it directly on your local machine, create and activate conda environment first

conda env create -f environment.yml
source activate deephive

Start the flask application

cd server
./start.sh

Start the worker containing the model

python worker.py

You will also need a Redis instance running.

To recompile the javascript first install the npm packages:

npm install

For convenience, a bundle.js file has been committed in the repo. Run webpack to re-compile:

npm run build

To start a development server (proxies /api requests to flask):

npm run start