Re: Anyone else looking at the Stanford courses for January?

[Mike DeLaurentis <delaurentis@gmail.com>]

I'm doing the AI and ML classes this term, and they're both really good. I'm thinking about taking NLP next term, but I'm on the fence. I think it's a shortened term; both classes are on a ten week schedule. I'd agree with Rob that the ML class takes about 4 hours per week. They structure the programming assignments so that you're really only implementing the guts of whatever algorithm they're covering, so it's pretty easy to rip through them in an hour or two. The submission process is automated, and they run some tests and reject your code if it doesn't give the right answer.

The AI class is a bit more of a commitment. They may cover five or six different topics in a week, and then have a review question about each one. You can do all the review questions on paper, though some of them lend themselves to writing a small program. I'd say that one is probably more like 4 - 8 hours per week, depending on how familiar you already are with the topics.

Anyway, I've been pretty impressed with both of them. I like the style they're using, where you watch a few minutes of lecture and then answer a short quiz online to make sure you're following along.

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 6:31 AM, Robert Di Marco <robdimarco@gmail.com> wrote:

I am taking the machine learning class right now and it is fantastic.  ML is a 10 week class, I would say the time commitment is about 4 hours a week.  But I have really learned a lot and the programming problems have been really well done.  I have signed up for cryptography and nlp for next session.

On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 11:39 PM, Alex Ullrich <alex.ullrich@gmail.com> wrote:

I would really like to take that PGM course.  Haven't taken any of
these, do they go for a full semester or is it a shortened format?
Just wondering what weekly time commitment would be like.

On Nov 20, 7:04 pm, Joseph Dickinson <jpd...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I signed up for Cryptography. Are these just online classes to take for free? Sorry, I'm new to this PGM :)
>
> Thanks
>
> Joe
>
> Joseph Dickinsonhttp://www.josephdickinson.com
>
> On Nov 20, 2011, at 5:33 PM, Nicholas Canzoneri wrote:
>
>
>
> > Bunch of new courses that seem pretty interesting.
>
> > The two that I'm deciding between now are "Probabilistic Graphical
> > Models" and "Design and Analysis of Algorithms"
>
> > PGM, for me, looks to be more interesting to me than AI or ML was.
> > Hoping to satisfy that intellectual itch.
>
> > The algo class I'm looking at because I've always felt that it was a
> > weak point for me. I've tried to start CLRS a few times on my own, but
> > failed before accomplishing much of anything, so I'm hoping a more
> > structured environment will help.
>
> > Anyone else looking at the classes? Full list of courses offered so
> > far (they just added Crypto a day or two ago so might add more) at the
> > bottom of this page:
>
> >http://www.pgm-class.org/
>
> > Cheers
>
> > Nick
>
> > --
> > Nick Canzoneri
> > ac3...@gmail.com
> > @ac3522