Norbert Preining
Norbert Preining, an Austrian native, stands at the crossroads of diverse disciplines as a Researcher, Developer, and Open Source Enthusiast, with a profound passion for mountain guiding. Based in both Vienna, Austria and Ishikawa, Japan, his professional journey spans multiple domains, including machine learning, big data, data analytics, and software development, underpinned by a solid foundation in many-valued logics, proof theory, intuitionistic logic, and mathematics. His expertise extends into the realms of algebraic specification and CafeOBJ, showcasing a remarkable blend of theoretical insight and practical application.
Currently, Norbert serves as a Principal Software Engineer at arXiv, contributing to the forefront of academic publishing and scientific communication. Prior to this, he honed his skills as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Mercari, Inc., where he tackled complex challenges in the e-commerce space with innovative AI solutions.
Sessions
Training an AI model can take minutes, hours or days. Waiting until the end to inspect a log file is often too late: loss may already be diverging, gradients may be behaving unexpectedly, validation performance may have stopped improving, or a data pipeline may simply be producing the wrong results.
Visdom provides an open-source way to see what is happening while an experiment is running.
In this session, Norbert Preining will show how Python applications and machine-learning workflows can send live data to Visdom and turn a running experiment into an interactive dashboard. Starting with only a few lines of Python, we will look at streaming loss and accuracy curves, NumPy data, images and model outputs directly into the browser.
The session will then move from individual plots to complete ML workflows: monitoring PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning training, collecting TensorFlow/Keras metrics, organizing experiments, recording hyperparameters and comparing runs. We will also look at how Visdom can be used to inspect images, embeddings and other intermediate results while a model is still training.
A key idea behind Visdom is that visualization should remain separate from the computation itself. Your training framework computes the metrics; Visdom receives, stores and visualizes them. This keeps the integration small, makes Visdom usable with many different frameworks and allows developers to run the visualization server locally, on their own infrastructure or alongside remote training systems.
The latest Visdom work also makes this approach useful for larger experiment workflows: experiments can carry parameters, metrics and tags, runs can be searched and compared, and live results can be explored through hyperparameter and experiment views.
The talk will use short code examples and live visualizations to show how quickly a normal Python or ML training loop can become observable.
Whether you are training a PyTorch model, working with TensorFlow/Keras, exploring NumPy data or building your own AI pipeline, the goal is the same:
don't wait for the experiment to finish to understand what it is doing.
Every 12 seconds, Ethereum produces a new block full of transactions, fees and smart-contract activity. Most people only see this data as a list of hashes on a block explorer. In this hands-on workshop, you will turn it into a live dashboard of your own.
We'll use Visdom and Web3.py to connect to an Ethereum node and stream blockchain data into charts. By the end of the session, each participant will have a working dashboard that updates with every new block, showing:
base fee and priority fee over time
transactions per block
legacy vs. EIP-1559 transaction types
the distribution of ETH transferred
a network overview panel with the latest headline figures
You'll learn how to arrange and save dashboard layouts, and how to set up separate environments for mainnet, testnets or individual contracts. We'll also look at next steps: smart-contract analytics, DeFi and NFT tracking, node health monitoring, and visualizing machine-learning models trained on on-chain data, such as anomaly or bot detection.
No blockchain experience is needed. Basic Python is enough.
What participants bring: A laptop with Python 3 installed, and a free Ethereum RPC endpoint from any provider. It would help to share setup instructions in advance so no workshop time goes to installs.
Bring your questions to the people who build and maintain FOSSASIA's open source projects. In this open session, FOSSASIA maintainers and GSoC mentors answer anything from the audience: how to make your first contribution, what maintainers look for in a pull request, how projects like Eventyay, Voxbento, Visdom, PSLab, Badge Magic are run day to day, and how you can get involved in FOSSASIA CodeHeat, Google Summer of Code and other programs.