Orange at Station Houston

With over 262 member companies, Station Houston is the largest hub for tech startups in Houston.

One of its members is also Genialis, a life science data exploration company that emerged from our lab and is now delivering pipelines and user-friendly apps for analytics in systems biology.

Thanks to the invitation by the director of operations Alex de la Fuente, we gave a seminar on Data Science for Everyone. We spoke about how Orange can support anyone to learn about data science and then use machine learning on their own data.

We pushed on this last point: say you walk in downtown Houston, pick first three passersby, take them to the workshop and train them in machine learning. To the point where they could walk out from the training and use some machine learning at home. Say, cluster their family photos, or figure out what Kickstarter project features to optimize to get the funding.

How long would such workshop take? Our informed guess: three hours. And of course, we illustrated this point to seminar attendees by giving a demo of the clustering of images in Orange and showcasing Kickstarter data analysis.

Related: Image Analytics: Clustering

Seminars at Station Houston need to finish with a homework. So we delivered one. Here it is:

1. Open your browser.
2. Find some images of your interest (mountains, cities, cars, fish, dogs, faces, whatever).
3. Place images in a folder (Mac: just drag the thumbnails, Win: right click and Save Image).
4. Download & install Orange. From Orange, install Image Analytics add-on (Options, Add-Ons).
5. Use Orange to cluster images. Does clustering make sense?

Data science and startups aside: there are some beautiful views from Station Houston. From the kitchen, there is a straight sight to Houston's medical center looming about 4 miles away.

And on the other side, there is a great view of the downtown.