This morning Madhu sent out a mail regarding few courses that Stanford University are offering. The courses are free of cost and start late in January. The duration is around 8 weeks. They’re perfect for self motivated people who are just interested in learning something new. The medium of discourse is obviously video lectures. One is supposed to go through them in their leisure time. Of course, one is expected to put in incremental effort every week instead of just revising the whole thing in the last week. There might be additional quizzes and assignments to be done. Also a mini-project is also a possibility. The emphasis is on learning.
Of late – after leaving Kharagpur to be more precise – I’ve had this appetite to learn something new. So the moment I saw this opportunity, I enrolled myself in 5 courses. The first one being Machine Learning by Prof. Andrew Ng. Here’s the link to the course – http://jan2012.ml-class.org/.I’ve been through his video lectures posted in Youtube, the first of which can be found at http://youtu.be/UzxYlbK2c7E. I’m taking this course to refresh my machine learning concepts. I expect this to be one of the better courses.
Another one I got myself enrolled into is the Game Theory course. Here is the link to the page - http://www.game-theory-class.org/. Everyne who has watched the movie – A Beautiful Mind – will agree to have been fascinated by the game theory concept. Shenoy and I tried to learn more about this by doing a mini-project in our third year, but I wouldn’t count that as a successful experience. Hopefully, this time the experience will be better.
The third course to interest me was the Cryptgraphy - http://www.crypto-class.org/. Once again, we had this in our third year but I never took it seriously enough even though the topic had always interested me. Lucky for me, my brother is doing a course in Cryptography this semester. So I’ll have someone close to talk to clear any specific doubts. There’s always the course forum otherwise.
The fourth one is Probabilistic Graphical Models - http://www.pgm-class.org/. The desire to take up the course arouse from the fact that it’ll be mathematically involved. Also I think the knowledge of models can supplement my Machine Learning fundamentals.
Lastly, I also got myself enrolled for the Natural Language Processing course - http://www.nlp-class.org/. Now this’ll be something entirely new – something I have absolutely no idea of. That is the exact reason why I want to study this subject. During my four years of engineering, I never picked up this course, but finally I have the chance to learn about this topic.
My expectation from the course is pretty simple – good lectures, good quizzes and assignments and a mini-project in each. At present I’m quite excited about getting started and I’ve convinced myself that I’ll definitely find time to study the subjects the right way this time. I hope I can do that. My goal is to know these 5 topics more in depth by the end of April – yeah, I expect to continue even after the course is done.
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