In this article, we’ll take a moment to look at some of the interesting things that transpired in 2018 in the machine learning world. We’ll look at some of the top open source projects as ranked by Mybridge, major developments in machine learning frameworks, and some of the things to look forward to in 2019.

Top Open Source Projects

Let’s look at some of the top open source projects from the previous year

BERT

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. BERT is a new method of solving natural language processing problems and obtains state of the art results. It’s based on TensorFlow and allows developers to solve problems using pre-trained models. BERT models have a big advantage over other models because they can identify the context in sentences. This project currently has 8841 stars and 1560 forks on Github. You can read the full academic paper here.

DeepCreamPy

This is a deep learning tool that reconstructs censored areas of an image just like an image editing tool (think Photoshop). One uses an image editing tool to color the censored areas in green, and the neural network fills those areas. The project currently has 6365 stars and 613 forks on GitHub.

TRFL

TRFL pronounced as truffle, is used to program reinforcement learning agents in TensorFlow. To try your hand at this, follow the documentation.

Horizon

Horizon is a platform for applied reinforcement learning. Horizon is built with PyTorch and uses Caffe2 for serving the model. A major advantage with Horizon is that it’s designed with production use cases in mind. To learn more about Horizon, check out the official paper at Facebook Research. If you’d like to try out Horizon you can check the documentation available here.

DeOldify

DeOldify, as the name suggests, is a deep learning library that colorizes and restores old images. The author has combined several approaches in order to achieve this. Namely, Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks, Progressive Growing of GANs, and the Two Time-Scale Update Rule. You can try it by heading over to this Notebook.

AdaNet

AdaNet is a TensorFlow based library that automatically learns models without requiring a lot of expert intervention. The project is based on the AdaNet algorithm. To get started with AdaNet, head over to the official documentation.