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Ask HN: Suggestions for a first Tensorflow project?

1 points by wuliwong ↗ HN
I would like to gain some experience by building an application using Tensorflow and deploying it on AWS servers. I was hoping for some suggestions as far as what to build. Feel free to be as detailed on general as possible. I imagine I will wind up doing a series of projects, adding different tools/techniques as I go.

One idea I had was to do handwriting recognition. A user could upload an image of handwriting and the application would return the text in the image. Maybe this is a reasonable place to start?

A note about my experience: I am an experienced "full stack" web developer with a Ph.D. in physics. I have a good deal of scientific programming experience but not much in the way of machine learning. I have some professional experience in my current job building the architecture around the models that our data scientists produce.

6 comments

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samstave
Upload a picture of what you have in your grocery cart and have it identify the products within the cart. Or alternately, upload a picture of the receipt for a grocery purchase - and keep an inventory of what food/ingredients you then have in stock from the receipt to be able to suggest recipes from. Allow for the repurchase of items from the receipts - have the system monitor what the original price was for the item and check amazon to find a better deal and alert you when that thing that you bought is now cheaper. Have it keep track of how often you buy something and build a predictive shopping list each month based on your rate of previous consumption.

Upload a picture of the receipt of your restaurant bills, and keep track of the types of foods eaten over time, how much you paid for them and maybe what your caloric intake was based on that information.

wuliwong
Cool ideas, thanks!

Do you know if there is existing training data for this type of project? I'm a complete noob when it comes to awareness of what datasets are available to get started with.

wuliwong
I've been focusing a lot more on my finances and budget lately, the idea of taking pictures of bills and receipts and implementing some forecasting and behavior tracking based on that sounds interesting.
samstave
You might want to see my other post here with some links...