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Computer vision basics in Excel, using just formulas
- sandesh1712 7y agoinsightful and commendable effort to explain a complex topic of computer vision and CNN with lucid simple hands on step wise example in excel
- eigenvalue 7y agoThis is an amazing idea! It's also a testament to the extreme power and efficiency of the core Excel code that everything works so smoothly despite this being not at all what Excel was designed for. There is something about everything-- data and "code"-- being so instantly and interactively available for inspection that makes everything seem simpler and easier to grasp.
- alok-g 7y agoIndeed. I have found Excel to be surprisingly fast at running this. I can also draw parallels to literate programming in this: The code and visualization of what the code is doing are very tightly integrated.
- zweep 7y ago90% of the world’s software developers don’t realize that they are software developers and their language is Excel formulas.
- samplatt 7y agoWhile that's true, a signification fraction of the remaining 10% is software devs cleaning up after the damage done by people who have over-estimated their ability and created a bunch of business solutions in VBA...
- ViPrLa 7y agoThose same business solutions have generated more value than costs.
- enraged_camel 7y agoYou only say that because the value you mention is usually visible whereas the costs are usually hidden or not obvious. For example, in my experience Excel is really good at providing job security to those who develop complex spreadsheets. But the cost to the organization tends to be enormous as well, because spreadsheets are impossible to scale, which in turn makes the processes that rely on them impossible to scale.
- kd5bjo 7y agoAny business that runs into that sort of scaling problem is already doing quite well for itself. How many of them would have gotten to that point if they needed to hire a software engineer to make every prototype that eventually led to the final working system?
- giantDinosaur 7y agoI currently work for a business that has done quite well replacing Excel solutions with proper databases. We've literally worked through the collapse of one company (and its rebirth after it was merged with something else) partially due to the sheer impossibility of managing Excel solutions that had grown out of control. Yes, they mainly grew out of control due to management problems, but the way they did so was remarkable in its rapidity and absurdity. Users were being bought machines with 16gb RAM so they could actually track their sales.
- mywacaday 7y agoDo you have a workflow or methodology that you use or do you analyse and develop from scratch? What are you replacing the spreadsheets with, desktop to web apps?
- 7y ago
- asdfman123 7y agoThat's true. It's also important to point out that a lot of what runs neural networks is just multiplying a bunch of numbers by each other and getting the "best fit." It's all matrix math. I was surprised how straightforward it was after taking Andrew Ng's coursera course, since ML is considered to be so advanced and cutting edge.
- barrkel 7y agoWell matrices just encode linear functions, so it's not the most surprising thing that you'd use them for calculating a lot of linear functions.
- lowdose 7y agoChart to data would be awesome. It takes a lot of time to adjust a png into an image possible to redistribute with custom branding. It's only surface detection so must be possible.
- stared 7y agoSee http://www.deepexcel.net/ http://www.deepexcel.net/ - and educational April Fool's Day from 2016. I used to show these spreadsheets to make it explicit that all operations are simple, as in addition, multiplication, max and ReLU.
- gugagore 7y agoCould someone report how feasible it is to run this in LibreOffice Calc?
- ryanjshaw 7y agoIt's in the linked readme: "While the files open in LibreOffice (tested in version 6.4.0.3 (x64)), it is slow to the level of being unusable. We have not tested in Apache OpenOffice."
- whereistimbo 7y agoIn my opinion this might because of xlsx compatibility overhead. Using ods format might speed up a bit.
- dclusin 7y agoMicrosoft has had really sharp people working on spreadsheet performance for many years. I remember reading a blog post from I believe Joel Spolsky or someone talking about what excel is doing behind the scenes to achieve high performance and I was pretty impressed. One example that comes to mind was that spreadsheets are just memory mapped files and the layout of the file on disk is identical to the data structures in memory. This allows them eschew translation to a data interchange format. So they got performance at the cost of interoperability, which is probably what's hampering open office & friends.
- blattimwind 7y ago> One example that comes to mind was that spreadsheets are just memory mapped files and the layout of the file on disk is identical to the data structures in memory. This allows them eschew translation to a data interchange format. So they got performance at the cost of interoperability, which is probably what's hampering open office & friends. That improves save/restore performance, but in and of itself doesn't do much about execution performance of macros.
- godelmachine 7y agoThe idea of transposing the 2-dimensional structure of image to the 2 dimensionalities of MS Excel is very intuitive.
- StreakyCobra 7y agoRemind me of this video of Matt Parker (standupmaths): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I
- alok-g 7y agoOP co-author here. :-) Yes, someone told us about this video when we first showcased this work. This video and a few more such works that we have discovered since then are linked in Q&A #7 in the readme. :-)
- LegitShady 7y agoThe text mentions a talk you gave. Was that recorded anywhere?
- alok-g 7y agoWe don't have a good-quality recording of this that we could release. I have been looking forward to making one in the future. Thanks for the interest. :-) Addendum: The text notes inserted within the Excel files partially cover for it, as that's roughy what the talk had, other than a possibility of live Q&A. The Q&A present in the readme is based on questions we have been actually asked. :-)
- StreakyCobra 7y agoCongrats for this work! I haven't read the page far enough before commenting it seems (: Anyway, I hope this offered 13 minutes of fun to some HN readers
- ioulian 7y agoAnother video about what you can achieve with Excel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 (HDR Image processing)
- yummypaint 7y agoVery nice. Spreadsheets are also great for doing quick monte carlo simulations. Things like finding the solid angle of a cylinder from an arbitrary perspective quickly become algebraicaly intractible. Raytracing with gnumeric is comparably easy.
- animalnewbie 7y agoI'm beginning to wonder who/what does/did more harm to technological progress - Microsoft or aversion to Microsoft? Sounds of the stuff they do is incredible, just not talked about.
- kevingadd 7y agoWhich of the two probably depends on the particular situation, as it often is in technology. Supposedly there was a time period where the Android team was considering .NET/C# instead of Java. In the short term their choice of Java was best for them but in the long run it led to things like the Oracle lawsuit and its threat of changing copyright law forever in a bad way - so it's interesting to consider what an alternate timeline would look like. IE6 was amazing at the time compared to its competitors, but then it quickly became a hindrance - a good example of how the situation can flip the moment the ecosystem changes.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoNo human atrocity has yet surpassed the killing of Netscape. /s
- zanderwohl 7y agoNo doubt they have some of the best software out there (not all of it, mind you) - Excel is a marvel. I think where a lot of us get wary is _how_ Microsoft sells their software. They're more than happy to charge you money every year whether the software gets major updates that year or not - and whether you, as a user, need any new features or not.
- harry8 7y agoDon't do stats with excel. It's all wrong, Microsoft won't fix the bugs. They really kind of earned their reputation in an honest and direct fashion. Aversion to Microsoft works great, doesn't it? Need a spreadsheet? Use gnumeric. Calculation errors are bugs and those bugs get fixed.
- nnghj 7y ago> Don't do stats with excel. It's all wrong, Microsoft won't fix the bugs. e.g?
- BrandiATMuhkuh 7y agoThis reminds me of a fast.ai video where they use Excel for a CNN.
- BrandiATMuhkuh 7y agoFound the video: https://youtu.be/gbceqO8PpBg https://youtu.be/gbceqO8PpBg
- bigmit37 7y agoYeah thought of this as well.
- wiseleo 7y agoInteresting how they published a paper on GitHub. I wonder who else will adopt this format.
- ta999999171 7y agoAnyone who wants their study reproduced!
- dsalzman 7y agoIf you want to see the power of "basic" operations. Watch this video of Dan Ingalls, co-inventor of Smalltalk, demo his software to do OCR on Devanagari text in 1980! https://vimeo.com/4714623 https://vimeo.com/4714623
- scroot 7y agoThis is such a cool demo
- sambeau 7y agoI had a friend doing this in 2003. He had a spreadsheet that could read road signs with a lot of white noise applied. He called it foveola vision. It was super impressive. He later converted it to a C library but the concept was essentially the same. https://www.scenereader.com https://www.scenereader.com
- hemantvirmani 7y agothis is an awesome approach to demonstrate something very complex in extremely easy way.
- bArray 7y agoI think the nicest part of this is for people to be able to poke at and inspect every part of the code - very cool. Normally these things are hidden in large loops! Here you can tug on a single thread and follow it through.
- FpUser 7y agoThis is just awesome
- bradgessler 7y agoSpreadsheets are highly hackable sandboxed self-contained runtimes. They’re a really great way to deliver self-contained client-side software that can quickly evolve.
- samdung 7y agoWhat is the most widely used database? Microsoft Excel. I was blown when i first learnt this fact.
- kzrdude 7y agoby users or in machines? If it's the latter, it surely is Sqlite?
- ganstyles 7y agoI would probably lean towards describing Excel as a data store rather than a database because it doesn't preserve many of the properties that make a database a database, such as acid compliance. Would anyone disagree?
- catblast 7y agoYes, acid compliance is not a prerequisite for what most people call a database either laypeople or not.
- airbreather 7y agoThat is sort of like calling a garbage tip a wharehouse - yes there is suff there, and yes you can find if you try hard enough, but yiou dont ever really know exactly what is there until you try to look for it and it could be way better organised.
- bsenftner 7y agoAnyone remember the line of PlayStation (PSX) bowling games? I was director of the studio that wrote "10 Ten Pin Ally", "Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling", "Flintstone Bowling" and others. The bowling physics engine was originally written by the founder of the studio in Excel. This is the same guy that made the Vectrix game console (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex), and he found it easier to work in Excel than the fixed point math & C compiler for the original PSX.
- Robotbeat 7y agoThis makes me wonder... has anyone bothered with hardware-accelerated Excel? Not just graphics acceleration. Seems like something you could do with an FPGA. I bet Microsoft has an FPGA-accelerated version of Excel in a lab somewhere.
- atum47 7y agoI heard a girl once saying that her dad can prove anything using Excel (she was talking about how her Dad has raised her and her brother), everyday I'm more convinced she was right.