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Stanford University Free Class: Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

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Re: Stanford University Free Class: Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

#51

Post by Vivtek »

brown9-2 wrote: post #48
zura wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML class is good, but I'm bit disappointed regarding programming assignments - it is just a translation of the given math formulas to the Octave/MATLAB syntax.

I agree with your description but I'm not sure if I'd call it disappointing. However I think it'd be really exciting if the class offered some sort of final project where you had to use the algorithms on some new domain of your own choosing (although of course you don't need a class to do this on your own).

The problem with that is it would require human intervention to grade. That's really not what this whole venture is about.

Although it would be cool to organize a showcase of such projects spontaneously!

Re: Stanford University Free Class: Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

#52

Post by barik »

zura wrote: post #35
Vivtek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm taking ML now and it's pretty darned good.

ML class is good, but I'm bit disappointed regarding programming assignments - it is just a translation of the given math formulas to the Octave/MATLAB syntax.

I don't mind it. It's well known from teaching that reading about something and actually doing something (even if it is the same something) is incredibly important. I find that writing the MATLAB code, even if it's just translating a known formula, has helped my understanding of ML overall.

On top of this, writing the Octave code lets me see line by line what the algorithm is doing as well, and it's a quick way to gain insight into the ML approaches by seeing exactly what each intermediate step is doing.

Finally, even when it's a "translation" I find that it's not that trivial to do. Seeing a formula on a page and being able to write that as vectorized MATLAB code has also been an interesting challenge.

Re: Stanford University Free Class: Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

#53

Post by robryan »

sjmulder wrote: post #7

I’m seriously considering taking half a year off to work on several of these classes, supported by a part time job. There’s just so much in there that we never properly treated at uni (bachelor level).

Yeah, I did 2 ai based classes, a probability class and tackled nlp for my honors thesis and still find I'm learning a fair bit from the ai class.

Re: Stanford University Free Class: Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

#54

Post by _delirium »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #38
plinkplonk wrote: post #15

The ideal situation is that other Universities get into the game, so we can pick and choose courses from specific professors - one course from MIT and another from Stanford and so on. Another thing I'd like to see is this idea expanding beyond CS to, say, Math and Physics. Within CS it would be great to see courses on Compilers, Operating Systems and so on. Yes I am greedy :p (and the courses are addictive!)

Why stop there? I hope we'll get an online version of every university course out there!

I think this might actually favor consolidation. With physical classrooms, you need hundreds of universities, but once a few universities are teaching an online Algorithms course in which thousands of people can enroll, it may be hard for additional universities, especially those with less exalted brand names than Stanford, to attract interest/students.

Re: Stanford University Free Class: Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

#55

Post by _delirium »

plinkplonk wrote: post #36
davidtgoldblatt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the following algorithms class CS 261 (upper-level undergraduate/masters) and CS 361b (mostly aimed at phd students, though undergraduates take it). 161 covers all the material you would expect to see in an undergrad algorithms class. I'd be surprised if 261 or 361b are put online, since they're not usually recorded and (at least when I took them) have between 10 and 20 students.

"I'd be surprised if 261 or 361b are put online, since they're not usually recorded and (at least when I took them) have between 10 and 20 students." Isn't that the exact reason they should be put online though? If there are say 5,000 students worldwide (vs 150,000 for the AI course) that is still a massive multiple. I sincerely hope Stanford doesn't stop at the "Introduction to X" courses. The upcoming "Probablistic…

I think smaller classes are trickier to online-ify in a way. With large lectures, they're already somewhat public, so recording them doesn't change things a lot. With a 10-person class, you often have more of a seminar-style discussion, with a lot of back-and-forth between students and professor and less of a pre-planned, one-way lecture. That might be harder to record well, and I think the seminar-style discussion might also suffer if students were "on the record", knowing that they were being broadcast rather than just chatting with the 10 people in the room.

Re: Stanford University Free Class: Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

#56

Post by bhrgunatha »

julsonl wrote: post #25
bhrgunatha wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about the practical side of these courses as well as the intellectual side. How much time does the course use up? I expect everyone is different - so it's a personal question of your time. Are there homework assignments or exercises? How are the practical aspects handled for example with learning a programming language?

With regards to the current classes, it typically takes 2-3 hours to consume the lectures (unless you have ADHD like me). 20 minutes to finish weekly exercises. 1-2 hours to finish the programming exercises in the ML class. The ML class also gave a crash course in programming Octave, which handled any language issues you may have for that course. I took 2 classes, which is a huge time-sink (I can't even go through th…

Thanks, I've signed up! I think I can spare enough time to make it worthwhile - reading the textbooks will probably be a stretch though.

Re: Stanford University Free Class: Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

#57

Post by NnamdiJr »

almost_usual wrote: post #5

This guy is a great lecturer, I'm working through his CS161 videos right now. You can get a sample of what his lectures will probably be like here http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?...

Know anywhere I can download those vids from? Streaming is a bit slow from where I am..
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