Nesterov’s Accelerated Gradient Descent performs a simple step of gradient descent to go from x_s to y_{s+1}, and then it ‘slides’ a little bit further than y_{s+1} in the direction given by the previous point y_s. The intuition behind the algorithm is quite difficult to grasp, and unfortunately the analysis will not be very enlightening either. Nonetheless Nesterov’s Accelerated Gradient is an optimal method (in terms of oracle complexity) for smooth convex optimization, …

Activation Ensemble
Many activation functions have been proposed in the past, but selecting an adequate one requires trial and error. We propose a new methodology of designing activation functions within a neural network at each layer. We call this technique an ‘activation ensemble’ because it allows the use of multiple activation functions at each layer. This is done by introducing additional variables, $\alpha$, at each activation layer of a network to allow for multiple activation functions to be active at each neuron. By design, activations with larger $\alpha$ values at a neuron is equivalent to having the largest magnitude. Hence, those higher magnitude activations are ‘chosen’ by the network. We implement the activation ensembles on a variety of datasets using an array of Feed Forward and Convolutional Neural Networks. By using the activation ensemble, we achieve superior results compared to traditional techniques. In addition, because of the flexibility of this methodology, we more deeply explore activation functions and the features that they capture. …

Apache Flume
Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available system for efficiently collecting, aggregating and moving large amounts of log data from many different sources to a centralized data store …