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Hi I am Jason Malcolm from Edinburgh, Scotland.

I am flying to San Francisco to attend the Deep Reinforcement Learning Bootcamp, and staying for 3 weeks - so if anyone has any local knowledge of labs, hacklabs, meetups, art-studios, organic/ permaculture farms or any intersection of art, craft, making, engineering, computers or robots in the Berkeley / San Fran Cisco area ( & will visit L.A. to see cousins ) then reply or PM me.

I am staying in Berkeley for 3 weeks if anyone has any recommendations for hacklabs, or computery robotic stuff, or fun or interesting things.

I have been studying Neural Nets for a few years, part time and online so this will be my first IRL course.

My father, Chris Malcolm, lectured in & researched AI & robotics at Edinburgh University and so I was exposed to computing and intelligent robots from a early age.

At Edinburgh College of Art, (part of Edinburgh University) I attained a Masters Degree in Tapestry - so I am a trained weaver, dyer and spinner of wool :) and I have been creatively exploring materials, ideas and inspiration for a couple of decades.

I have always been into math & programming, beginning with Microsoft BASIC on the NASCOM II, PASCAL and then BBC BASIC, BBC LOGO. Gave it up to do art for a few years. Then computer animation, old-school realtime VRML97 for VJs, 3ds-max, then Blender & python.

I support my creativity by making websites for others, initially handwritten HTML ( and VRML :) ), Javascript, then PHP and now often Wordpress - I program quite a bit in my spare time.

A Lecture by Professor Geoffrey Hinton, demonstrating the wake sleep algorithm training a Restricted Boltzmann Machine to draw digits from MNIST made me think, machines can be creative.

Then the first MOOCs happened and I took, Professor Andrew Ng's Machine Learning and Professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun's MOOC Introduction to AI ( based on the textbook Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach by Peter Norvig and Stuart Russel ).

I then took Geoffrey Hinton's MOOC Neural Networks for Machine Learning and this enabled me to read & comprehend papers and try replicating experiments using some of the libraries from Toronto University.

Since then studying to varying degrees of success parallel GPU programming, elementry physics, calculus, haskell, Stanford's CS231n, & Berkeley's CS294-112.

I want to study robotics because I believe that AI can best succeed when computation is embodied in a creature.

I hope to work towards developing robots that can learn to assist and perform useful tasks, like gardening, housebuilding, ecology or folding shirts.

My (current) long term research goals are to enable robots to talk about what they are doing, short term: get Tensorflow to control my Cheerson CX-10WD nano FPV drone and learn to fly it using Reinforcement Learning.

The idea of Strong AI ( where the machines 'awaken' ) may happen but I think Professor Dan Dennet is correct that we will build machines that will build machines that build machines, &c, that may achieve strong AI, i.e. self-evolution.

I sometimes dream of machine learning coming up with creative solutions to help us colonise the solar system. Occaisionaly I imagine a far flung future when Robots may become considered another domain of life with their own wants, dreams and motivations that are a paradigm shift away from what we know now - perhaps in a millenia or so.

Probably just getting a robot to make a really good cup of tea is a not ignoble goal.