Today, I completed the midterm exam for the online AI class in enrolled in a few weeks ago. 15 questions directly related to the videos presented in the course were asked about various subjects, such as the types of intelligent agents, search algorithms, probabilities, bayes networks and markov decision processes, just to name a few. As the course is available worldwide, we were given 72 hours to complete it so that everyone has a chance to find a time that fits his schedule. Let’s see on Tuesday if I’ve done well.
A few weeks ago, some well known professors at Stanford University launched online classes, two of them about Artificial Intelligence. More precisely, one of them is named “Introduction to AI” (given by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig) and the other one is “Machine Learning” (by Andrew Ng). It is a successful worldwide experiment, each class counts several dozens of thousands of students.
I’ve always been interested in the field without ever taking the time to learn how things work, so I decided to enroll in the advanced track of both classes. That is, with homework and programming assignments each week. A basic track is available for those who want to see the material without being scored on homework and assignments.
Although there will be no official Stanford certificate in the end, the organisators will provide a statement of accomplishment with the final score as percentage and a percentile ranking with all those who completed the advanced track.
These courses are very well explained and almost all prerequisites are reviewed before using them so it is really accessible even for people who are absolute begginers in the field.
I don’t know if this will blend somehow with my ongoing research focusing mainly on SMT solvers at the moment. The goal here is to learn something new and to transform it into a useful skill.
Found on Twitter : “@BabyPips: Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude. It comes from a commitment to do the very best with whatever you have available.”
Today, I finally bought an Apple keyboard with the numeric keypad. I find it much easier to use my 24″ screen with my macbook pro when I’m at home with an external keyboard placed right in front of the screen rather than having to look sideways when typing on the laptop’s keyboard.
Moreover, this is one of the best keyboards I’ve ever used. Small, lightweight, beautiful, and probably one of its best features, just as the keyboard of the macbook pro, it is nearly impossible to fill it with crumbs when eating in front of the screen (yeah, I know it’s bad, but I’m a geek, so I have an excuse)
Hereunder, a nice picture taken from one of the blogs I follow : Coding Horror
Apple Keyboard
I just installed WordPress for Android, so I’m testing it right now. Let’s see how it works…
At first sight, it looks quite easy to use even if writing in english with Swype requires to use the qwerty keyboard layout. I’m mostly using azerty so that’s pretty annoying but I’ll get over it.
Besides that, I’m not sure that I would write long posts using this but it is totally appropriated for short posts longer than regular tweets.
I hope that this will actually help me to update this blog more often.
Okay, since I didn’t take the time to write an article myself today, here’s a link to a great blog post from Alan Skorkin. It explains why math skills aren’t really a prerequisite to become a good programmer, but that you really do need them to fully understand what’s happening and to be able to make great improvements and make a real contribution to the software development world.
To end this week and start a new one, here’s a blog post I find quite interesting, listing 10 things that help Tuomas Pelkonen to get highly productive.
Hello !
As most of the posts I intend to publish here will be focused on computer science, programming and software engineering, I thought the default title, “Hello World !” was totally appropriate for my first post.
I already have a lot of ideas I could blog about, so my first challenge will be to make some time to actually write the articles. Besides that, I often find other really interesting blog posts that I’ll share with you when I find them.
Happy reading !