Symfony News: Machine Learning in PHP

Machine Learning in PHP

Machine Learning (ML) is arguably the most influential technology since the Internet. It has been described as "the new electricity" by Coursera founder Andrew Ng and it is the area of artificial intelligence that has seen the most advancement to date. In this talk, we'll discuss what Machine Learning really is and how we can apply it in PHP.

Part 1 - Programming With Data

We'll start off by introducing a new way of programming which is fundamentally different from traditional programming but can still be coded in the languages we use today. With this new technique in hand, we'll demonstrate how it can be applied in PHP to build intelligent programs that learn from data.

Part 2 - Rubix ML

Next I'll present a framework that I created for rapid prototyping which can be used to build machine learning models like Lego bricks in PHP. I'll also demo some interesting ML problems using the library.

Part 3 - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Finally, we'll compare PHP to other languages that are commonly used in data science such as Python, MATLAB/Octave, and R. We'll show some advantages that PHP has over these languages and we'll also point out the areas where PHP can be improved.

Although I plan a very lighthearted presentation, it would be impossible to go through a whole machine learning talk without touching on some advanced concepts. Therefore, it would be good to know but not necessary …

- Understanding of PHP syntax (I'll demo code)
- Geometric concepts such as distance and dimensionality
- Basic Linear Algebra such as linear transformations
- Basic Calculus such as the derivative
- Orders of asymptotic complexity (Big O notation)

About The Speaker
Andrew DalPino is a programmer, entrepreneur, and artificial intelligence enthusiast. After nearly a decade he left the live music industry as a concert organizer to pursue AI and engineering full time. Andrew is the author of an open-source Machine Learning library for PHP called Rubix ML which is currently in alpha. He can often be found dancing at his desk, staring up at the stars, or talking about Laravel.

Andrew's Website - https://andrewdalpino.com
Rubix ML - https://github.com/andrewdalpino/Rubix-ML