# Blog posts

## Solving ODE/PDE with Neural Networks

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Differential equations and neural networks are naturally bonded. The best paper “Neural Ordinary Differential Equations” in NeurIPS 2018 caused a lot of attentions by utilizing ODE mechanisms when updating layer weights. On the other direction, there are also many research using neural network approaches to help investigate differential equations such as “Deep learning for universal linear embeddings of nonlinear dynamics”, “DGM: A deep learning algorithm for solving partial differential equations” or “Solving Irregular and Data-enriched Differential Equations using Deep Neural Networks”. In this post, I will make two toy examples to show the very the basic idea of using deep learning method for solving differential equations.

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## Some intro

Recently I attended a workshop helping solve industrial problem hosted by the Fields Institute. One of the problems presented is developing accurate/efficient methods for matching Raman spectra from test sample to samples recorded in the library so that different chemicals can be detected effectively. This is a quite chanllenging problem. Theoretically speaking, though Raman spectroscopy is commonly used in chemistry to provide a structural fingerprint by which molecules can be identified, there are a huge amount of chemicals out in the nature among which many have quite similar Raman spectra. The fact that test samples are usually a mixture of different molecules make the problem even more difficult. Pratically speaking, spectra data recorded is not perfect. There will be noises of different kinds and background/baseline signal flooding the useful information.

## Uottawa VPN connection via wifi

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It seems that the bash script provided by the university does not work for my machine with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For a wireless connection through VPN to be able to be “on campus”, you can follow the easy steps listed below.

• Run the following commends in the location where you saved the configuration file:
pcf2vpnc empl.pcf  empl.conf
sudo cp empl.conf /etc/vpnc/
sudo vpnc empl


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## The Problem

I have a dual system window10/Ubuntu16.04 installed in my laptop. Today I can not access window files from Ubuntu and tried one command line from youtube which seems to mess things up :< The system did not boot like before but entering into the grub prompt instead. It seems that system does not know where/what to boot now and may need a manual configuration.

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## Why Leaves?

From long time ago, people have already learned to identify different kinds of plants by examing their leaves. Nowadays, leaf Morphology, Taxonomy and Geometric Morphometrics are still actively investigated. Leaves are beautiful creations of nature, people today are frequently inspired by them for creations of art works. For example, Candian people use a maple leaf as the center of their flag. It would very nice if computers can help create leaves automatically from sratches. I assume this is a very difficult task. In order to make a beginner’s start, it may be beneficial to investigate what makes different leaves different from each other. This is a classification problem. Features learned from classification may help us have a peek at a glimpse of nature’s genius idea when it decides to make such creations. In industry, automatic recognition of plants is also useful for tasks such as species identification/reservation, automatic separate management in botany gardens or farms uses plants to produce medicines. It is also a good practice for me to learn things that are beyong textbooks.