Online courses
As I have mentioned at some point the past, Stanford is offering some online classes. As far as I know, there are three such classes: artificial intelligence, machine learning and databases.
I joined up the AI and the ML one. This is the third week of classes now, so it’s perhaps time to draw up some initial thoughts.
Both classes are challenging, they put out a lot of material to go through and there are weekly assignments. There seems to be a stronger emphasis on work “in class” or more precisely while watching the lecture videos than in regular classroom courses, but this may depend on your experience (I actually took one or two classes with a similar amount of in-class work). The homeworks so far have seemed rather light (meaning short, not necessarily easy or difficult). I’m guessing it will pick up as we move forward.
I think that the machine learning course is much better in terms of logistics. I can check the progress easier, there’s a discussion forum up on the website, I can watch videos at different speeds and the idea of using slides and a tablet for presentation notes seems much better than hand-writing on paper slides. Also the sound quality is better, but this is just being picky about details, the content is very good from both and well presented.
So I’m quite happy with the classes so far, but it’s a very different experience from a real class (as you may expect). The biggest issue I’m finding is with asking questions. One of the things that I thought was really exciting about these classes was that they were trying to design a system for answering questions that was suppose to push up the most voted/popular questions (since they can’t possibly answer questions from all the students enrolled). Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have happened yet and I think that’s a very important thing that needs to be solved.
I’m looking forward to see how this will work out. Fun fun 
Sad October
This has been a very sad October for the tech world. After Steve Jobs passed away earlier this month, we lost two more tech giants in the following weeks.
Dennis Ritchie, known best as the creator of C and a key person in the development of Unix, died this month. With all the credit given to companies like Apple and Google for their innovation, it is important to say that without people like Ritchie, none of what we use right now would be around.
And if that wasn’t enough of a hit to the tech world, John McCarthy – the inventor of LISP and a pioneer in artificial intelligence – also died this October. Both Ritchie and McCarthy were Turing Award winners and I would say influenced the world of computing at least as much as Steve Jobs did, if in a different way and not so much in the spotlight.
If you take the most recent iPhone, this influence is easy to trace. The operating system is a “unix-like” OS. The programming language for building apps is based on C. The new Siri “talk-to-your-phone” functionality is just a modern example of the progress in artificial intelligence. So while we pay our respects to Jobs for his dedication to usability and aesthetics, we mustn’t forget the people working behind the scenes to make these technologies possible. All of these are essential to the progress of the tech world and they are all deserving of our respect, love and gratitude.
