Stanford Class

What a nice coincidence. Right after I wrote about freely available online lectures, a different way of certifying, I saw this:

“A bold experiment in distributed education, “Machine Learning [class]” will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. Students will have access to lecture videos, lecture notes, receive regular feedback on progress, and receive answers to questions. When you successfully complete the class, you will also receive a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Professor Andrew Ng, the curriculum draws from Stanford’s popular Machine Learning course.”

Yes, Stanford, as well as MIT (through OCW initiative) already make video lectures available to everyone over the Internet. Ng’s class goes one step further: During Fall of 2011 anyone in the world will be able to follow and to a degree, participate in this class. Very cool.

What is taught in ML class? Let me summarize this way: if one day Skynet took over the world and a robot with an Austrian accent kicked your ass, this is the class you should blame. Joking aside, ML is about teaching machines how to learn. I sometimes call the methods and algorithms used here as “machine scientists” because frequently what ML researchers end up doing is teaching machines how to model mathematically / automatically. Modeling is science’s main tool for making sense of nature’s data obviously.