I don't think YOLO [0], the object detector he talked about, requires a massive amount of data as he claimed. Yes, if you want to learn how to classify 1000 different categories like on ImageNet, then yes, you need a lot of data. But if you're taking a pretrained network like YOLO (it was pretrained on ImageNet and trained on Pascal), you don't need a lot of images. I've retrained it with the KITTI dataset [1] and had no issues at all. They're only 7k images. By the way KITTI actually has a vehicles dataset that might be helpful for your case. And also by the way, you don't even need to retrain YOLO with your vehicle dataset. It was trained on Pascal VOC [2], a dataset of 20 categories and one of the categories is car. So YOLO already knows how to detect cars, it just might not be ideal for your dataset, but you don't care anyways since you just want any solution to compare to as a baseline. This would probably have been even less work than training the cascade classifier you used and have achieved better results.
Reminds me of http://www.nina4airbnb.com/ who made an extensive analysis of where airbnb should target next in an attempt to convince airbnb to hire her.
After her website went viral, she did eventually get an interview with airbnb. While making such an analysis is no guarantee of a job, she was rejected because the interviewer couldn’t contextualize her experience because she "hadn’t worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford".
She did however in the process land several interviews with different companies and picked a company called upwork in the end. So this kind of work can have several positive side effects even if your initial objective is not reached.
Quite interesting how the authors even mention that this strategy is very economically viable.
From the paper: 'Assuming a selling price of $2 per 1,000 solved captchas, our token harvesting attack could accrue $104 - $110
daily, per host (i.e., IP address). By leveraging proxy services and running multiple attacks in parallel, this amount
could be significantly higher for a single machine.'
The author did compare their performance with captcha-solving services. His accuracy is comparable to the service with no extra cost to the attacker.
From the paper: "We compare our performance to that of Decaptcher, the (self-reported) oldest captcha-solving service. We selected Decaptcher for two reasons. First, it supports the image reCaptcha, charging $2 per 1000 solved captchas. [...] Interestingly, some of our summitted challenges rejected due to the service being overloaded, and had to be resubmitted
at a later time, and received a time-out error as the solvers did not provide an answer in the time window
allocated by the service. 258 challenges (36.85%) were an exact match. When taking into account the flexibility,
321 (44.3%) of the captchas were solved. The average solving time for the challenges that received a solution was
22.5 seconds. While the accuracy may increase over time as the human solvers become more accustomed to the
image reCaptcha, it is evident that our system is a cost-effective alternative. Nonetheless, our completely offline
captcha-breaking system is comparable to a professional solving service in both accuracy and attack duration, with
the added benefit of not incurring any cost on the attacker."
A little hard to take seriously considering the author works for Canonical. Even so the author didn't seem very excited about it, it felt more like an acceptable phone and not that it's better than Android or iOS.
I wonder how much faster the new Tesla P100 is compared to the Tesla K40 in training neural networks. The K40s were the best available GPUs for training deep neural networks.
I thought Jeff Dean was the 'Chuck Norris' of programming. He designed (with others) a lot of Google's biggest infrastructure projects as well as multiple iterations of the main search infrastructure.
Among others, the projects he's worked on include:
Spanner - a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database
Some of the production system design and statistical machine translation system for Google Translate.
BigTable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system.
MapReduce a system for large-scale data processing applications.
Google Brain a system for large-scale artificial neural networks
LevelDB an open source on-disk key-value store.
TensorFlow an open source machine learning software library.
I'm not an european citizen, have a job offer to work in a big tech company in Zurich and will not be able to get a visa even though I've got my Bachelors and Masters degree in Europe. Since the referendum passed, they're now requiring 3 years full-time work experience regardless of which education degree you hold.
I'm not an EU citizen. I doubt top tech companies would reject a candidate just because it's more visa work. They usually have an entire immigration department just for handling these cases.
I highly doubt this has to do with cover letters. From Google's Job FAQ:
"Cover letters are optional, and applications with them are not preferred over those without. We recommend using a cover letter only to bring up anything that would not be evident from the rest of your application. It can also be an opportunity to let Google know about you as an individual, in addition to why you're a good fit for the organization. We strongly recommend using your resume to represent your candidacy."
http://www.google.com/intl/cn/jobs/students/sga/mba/internsh...
From a Google Screener:
"As a heavy interviewer and occasional resume screener at Google, I rarely look at the cover letter. Your resume should give me enough context for whether you have the key experience for the role."
http://www.quora.com/How-should-a-cover-letter-for-Google-lo...
I've went through the same thing as OP. I'm a student located out of the US that applied for internships at all major companies in the US (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, Palantir, etc) for summer last year. I really have to disagree with people mentioning cover letters or costs to bring international students. I didn't submit any cover letter and got accepted for two of those companies for an internship in the US and accepted an internship with one of them.
Google for example really doesn't care about cover letters. This used to be at Google's Job FAQ:
"Cover letters are optional, and applications with them are not preferred over those without. We recommend using a cover letter only to bring up anything that would not be evident from the rest of your application. It can also be an opportunity to let Google know about you as an individual, in addition to why you're a good fit for the organization. We strongly recommend using your resume to represent your candidacy."
http://www.google.com/intl/cn/jobs/students/sga/mba/internsh...
By a Google Screener:
"As a heavy interviewer and occasional resume screener at Google, I rarely look at the cover letter. Your resume should give me enough context for whether you have the key experience for the role."
http://www.quora.com/How-should-a-cover-letter-for-Google-lo...
I've noticed you've probably studied a lot already on how a resume look like, I can see you're using Gayle's template for CVs and I did the same thing. Your CV is pretty good and better than mine, it should definitely be attractive to recruiters because of your awards (ACM ICPC 2015 World Finalist) and your previous experience (multiple internships).
Here's the thing, the hard part is getting a recruiter to actually read your CV. Coincidentally or not, only the companies to which I was referred by full timers actually bothered to interview me. I have the impression the strength of the referral also makes a huge difference. For one of the companies my referral was from another intern and I didn't get an interview. Was your referral from an FTE or another intern?
The one difference I can pinpoint between us is that you're applying from the middle east and I applied from Europe. I'm really not sure how much of a difference this makes, but I can tell you that I did not see many foreigners from that region during my internship last year. I'm not sure this should actually make a difference, because my visa situation wasn't quite simple either and the company didn't seem to have any issue with the fact I'm from south america and applied for a J1 visa while living abroad in Europe. My guess would be your CV isn't getting read and to try to get stronger referrals.
How are you going to know where someone's property ends? You're not going to equip a lawn mower with a mounted laser range finder and sophisticated image processing capabilities.
It is not about it being completely free. The whole point is how 235€ or even 1000€ per semester is nothing compared to tens of thousands americans pay in tuiton. Top universities in the US like MIT and Stanford charge over $40000 per year. With half of that you could comfortably live as a student in Germany for a year with all expenses paid. I live as a student in Germany on 650€/mo. That's less than $10000 a year.
I thought it was obvious that there are still going to be fees, but that in comparison to the tens of thousands americans pay in tuition, it's basically free.
[0]: http://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/
[1]: http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/
[2]: http://host.robots.ox.ac.uk/pascal/VOC/