Teaching Open Source Software in North Korea

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2021-06-24 17:00:17

In 2016, I went to North Korea to teach a class of masters students how to contribute to open source software. Here’s an image from one of my lectures:

As part of the class, students were required to submit patches to a project of their choosing, and I want to share the stories of how two of these patches landed into the popular machine learning libraries mlpack and vowpal wabbit. I believe these examples highlight how academic collaboration between North Koreans and Americans can benefit ordinary citizens of both countries and improve diplomatic relations.

One of the students was working on a “vision-based vehicle detection system” for his masters thesis. In this problem, we are given a live feed from a video camera mounted near a road, and the goal is to count the number of cars and trucks that pass by. This is a fairly standard machine vision problem that students around the world regularly implement, and the output looks something like:

(This image unfortunately isn’t from the student’s project, but is instead taken from https://github.com/ahmetozlu/vehicle_counting_tensorflow.)

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