"While there is a great number of libraries, source code and binaries for different algorithms, it is always difficult to get a good grasp of what they do. Moreover, one ends up spending a great amount of time just getting the algorithm to display the results in an understandable way. Change the algorithm and you will have to do the work all over again. Some people have tried, and succeeded, to combine several algorithms into a single multi-purpose library, making their libraries extremely useful (you will find many of their names in the acknowledgements below), but still they didn't solve the problem of visualization and ease of use. Matlab is an easy answer to that, but while extremely easy to use for generating and displaying single instances of data processing (data, results, models), Matlab is annoyingly slow and cumbersome when it comes to creating an interactive GUI. While preparing the exercice sessions for the Applied Machine Learning class at EPFL, I decided to combine the code snippets, example programs and libraries I had at hand into a seamless application where the different algorithms could be compared and studied easily." - Jan Wessnitzer