Well, finding out that I've no chance of making the top 1,000 in the class or any opportunity of a job is certainly a swift kick in the huevos, 2 days before the final...
:(
Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
61–70 of 115 posts
Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree the programming assignments have been very easy. However, I doubt they have the bandwidth to manually grade thousands of assignments. Given the scale of the class, the grading is forces to be automated. It's hard to come up with such assignments and even harder to make them challenging, given an automated grading script.
The grading doesn't need to be manual. Think of the lab assignments being something like a smaller scale of the Netflix challenge: 1) They provide some set of data and establish rules for the competition. 2) They implement their own solution to the challenge, and that is the benchmark. 3) A "passing grade" is obtained by getting any working system. 4) The actual grading is then given on a curve, compared against thei…
I think this is a brilliant idea and is already being implemented by many training organisations through kaggle.com's "kaggle in class" program: http://inclass.kaggle.com/
Using this system for ml-class (and presumably the forthcoming pgm-class and nlp-class) would be extremely beneficial for real-world application of the information presented.
That said, learning what the algos are and how they work is one thing; learning how to actually apply them to real life situations is another thing. I think the class leans quite heavily towards the former, but I really love the few glimpses of the latter.
Personally, as someone who is new to the field (didn't do maths at college) & is barely fitting the classes & exercises around a fulltime workload & other things, I am glad that the programming exercises are "easy". Some of them are ridiculously easy, agreed (where 1/2 the solution is given basically verbatim in the pdf notes, and the other 1/2 in the code comments) - but for most of them I think it's enough to wrap my head around what's actually happening, especially in terms of the multiclass neural network assignment. That gives me enough foundation to try to apply them to real-world situations on my own time.
Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#63Prof Thrun mentioned in the last office hours that there were about 1650 people with "perfect scores" and he seemed a little thunderstruck by that and said he would admit these folks into Stanford if he could, because they are (paraphrasing, from memory)"Stanford quality". What struck me was how much importance he gave to this metric, which isn't that hard to game on an online offering. I know a few people (who shall…
It is surprising that you thought of this as a "cool AI job offer". I have two remarks here. First, the email sent to the class is barely an invitation to send resumes. Something many programmers/CS Students with online presence experience on a regular basis. Probably not from a Stanford Professor but at least from major companies recruiters. It would be interesting to know how many will actually make it through the screening, phone/on-site interviews and get a job offer.
Second, I registered for the Machine Learning course (I am not sure if the same applies to the AI course) and I compared it with the actual ML course at Stanford (CS229) (I mainly looked at Youtube videos of Andrew[1] as well as Assignments/Midterm[2]). The latter is by far more advanced and theoretical. The assignments tend to test more than basic comprehension of the material presented in the lectures, which is exactly what the online course reviews tend to evaluate. They require strong mathematical knowledge and obviously a minimum level of creativity/intelligence.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=machine+learning...
Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#64Prof Thrun mentioned in the last office hours that there were about 1650 people with "perfect scores" and he seemed a little thunderstruck by that and said he would admit these folks into Stanford if he could, because they are (paraphrasing, from memory)"Stanford quality". What struck me was how much importance he gave to this metric, which isn't that hard to game on an online offering. I know a few people (who shall…
It is surprising that you thought of this as a "cool AI job offer". I have two remarks here. First, the email sent to the class is barely an invitation to send resumes. Something many programmers/CS Students with online presence experience on a regular basis. Probably not from a Stanford Professor but at least from major companies recruiters. It would be interesting to know how many will actually make it through the…
"It is surprising that you thought of this as a "cool AI job offer"."
I don't. That part of the post was written with tongue firmly attached to cheek. If that tone didn't come through, that means I have to improve my writing.
The online ML course is CS 229A (which is also an actual course at Stanford. The online version is close to the Stanford course).
The "tough" version is CS 229 (no 'A' at the end). I registered for the ML course thinking it was an online version of CS 229 and dropped out when it was confirmed to be 229A. In my politically incorrect opinion, 229A is close to worthless. The math is important in real world ML. This course included gems such as "if you don't know what a derivative is, that is fine".
The online AI course is almost exactly the same course as Stanford (CS 221), minus, of course, the programming assignments. It is an introductory, broad based course, and it does the job well (imo)
The online DB course is almost (if not exactly) the same as Stanford CS 145. I think this was the best course of the three.
All courses track the corresponding Stanford courses.
Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#65Getting new jobs is great. However, stay put in your jobs. Try to apply what you learned to little problems at work. Everyone has a huge database these days. I work for a medical device company and I write software that processes blood (embedded stuff). Every year, a million or so run logs find their way into one of our databases. There is a wealth of information there that we could figure out. Eg. How do me maximize…
I wish I could +1 this more than once. This is exactly the point, to me. There's not really such a thing as "an AI job". There is application of AI techniques to existing problems. Those problems are already found riddled throughout every job everyone's ever worked in.
You can't sit back and wait for AI to "happen". What would that even look like? The benefit of these techniques is in application to existing data; you don't have to quit and found some kind of computer vision/kinect/big data startup to take advantage of the knowledge.
You should be aiming to put yourself out of a job by using AI.
Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is surprising that you thought of this as a "cool AI job offer". I have two remarks here. First, the email sent to the class is barely an invitation to send resumes. Something many programmers/CS Students with online presence experience on a regular basis. Probably not from a Stanford Professor but at least from major companies recruiters. It would be interesting to know how many will actually make it through the…
"It is surprising that you thought of this as a "cool AI job offer"." I don't. That part of the post was written with tongue firmly attached to cheek. If that tone didn't come through, that means I have to improve my writing. The online ML course is CS 229A (which is also an actual course at Stanford. The online version is close to the Stanford course). The "tough" version is CS 229 (no 'A' at the end). I registered…
Now, it makes a lot more sense :)
Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#67Prof Thrun mentioned in the last office hours that there were about 1650 people with "perfect scores" and he seemed a little thunderstruck by that and said he would admit these folks into Stanford if he could, because they are (paraphrasing, from memory)"Stanford quality". What struck me was how much importance he gave to this metric, which isn't that hard to game on an online offering. I know a few people (who shall…
I know a few people (who shall remain nameless) who collaborate and check each others
Why would someone do this for a free online course that gives no credit for a degree? I mean, the whole point is to learn, not get the highest grade. I really fail to understand people sometimes.
Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#68Sadly, I'm not expecting any such letter from Ng's ML class, because I'll bet there's 10k people tied for top marks. That's at least partly due to an extremely effective teaching system and style, so I'd say it's a worthwhile tradeoff.
I don't know the numbers for the ML class and the format is a bit different, however, for DB class from the many people that were signed up only 9180 took the midterm[1] and (only 908 got scores >= 18/20) So if ML numbers are in any way similar to this maybe it wouldn't be so bad. That is if there was such a letter. I'll add that Professor Widom's style is quite engaging as well. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL…
I wonder about this. Apparently the letter we get at the end contains our ranking. I wonder what the distribution of scores would be; I'd assume there would be a small fraction of enrolments actually doing the exercises, a big spike at 100%, and most falling in the range of 80-100%. Personally I forgot that I hadn't done a couple of the quizzes, so did them late, and didn't complete the optional part of the first week's programming assignment on time, so although I've probably got a "good mark" on paper, I'm probably nowhere near the top 10% of students.
Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#69Maybe, but be careful and think 'long shot': I was one of three researchers in a team at Yorktown Heights that did some of the best research in AI in the world, published a string of peer-reviewed papers, was the source of two commercial products, gave a paper at the AAAI IAAI conference in Stanford with for that year the 25 best AI applications in the world, personally won an award, etc. I've taught computer science…
You were looking for someone to hire you to do AI work because you were great in AI. This reads more to me as using a student's performance in ai-class as a proxy for their overall software engineering performance. Seems like a better metric than many others that employers use.
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Re: Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class
#70Maybe, but be careful and think 'long shot': I was one of three researchers in a team at Yorktown Heights that did some of the best research in AI in the world, published a string of peer-reviewed papers, was the source of two commercial products, gave a paper at the AAAI IAAI conference in Stanford with for that year the 25 best AI applications in the world, personally won an award, etc. I've taught computer science…
You were looking for someone to hire you to do AI work because you were great in AI. This reads more to me as using a student's performance in ai-class as a proxy for their overall software engineering performance. Seems like a better metric than many others that employers use.
I was just trying to get HIRED for anything, anything at all, not seriously illegal, immoral, or dangerous, and I would have compromised on those.
So, since this thread was about 'job placement' for students who did well in an AI class, I posted about my experience getting hired where part of my background was some expertise in AI.
Net, I have to conclude that, in getting a "job", expertise in AI will be from very rarely helpful to often a serious disqualification as in "It appears that you are overqualified for our position and would not be happy in it".