Today, it's a bit harder to summarise exactly what I've learnt as it consisted of the material from 2 hours of lectures on machine learning and about an hour on language processing. I also learnt about how == works in Java between Strings and objects compared with primitive types. It might be a slow process, but hopefully I'm improving.
I feel a mixture of sadness and relief today as I've finished the second of the three free Stanford courses running this term. It's been interesting looking behind the scenes at how machine learning is being used all around us from news sites recommending news we might be interested in to variable pricing on websites depending on acceptance or rejection of previous offers to predicting whether a tumour might be cancer or not. The course was quite mathematical and the programming involved a high level of vectorisation so that built in algebra libraries could be used. Today I finally understood why we used the summation sign rather than just working with the vectorised version all the time. It's because in order to split the work over multiple computers or cores, we give each computer/core part of the summation to do, then combine the results.
It's really quite amazing what can be done, and is being done in this field. The course has given me quite a few "so that's how they do it" moments.
The course runs again from January for about 10 weeks. For details see http://jan2012.ml-class.org/. From looking at the other course dates, my guess is it will start around the last week in January.
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