We present a pedagogical introduction to the recent advances in the computational geometry, physical implications, and data science of Calabi-Yau manifolds. Aimed at the beginning research student and using Calabi-Yau spaces as an exciting play-ground, we intend to teach some mathematics to the budding physicist, some physics to the budding mathematician, and some machine-learning to both. Based on various lecture series, colloquia and seminars given by the author in the past year, this writing is a very preliminary draft of a book to appear with Springer, by whose kind permission we post to ArXiv for comments and suggestions.

The educational system is broken, and unfair. For decades, if not centuries, learning was limited by geography and having the means to continue with higher education. Online learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs) promised to address the inequities in education while extending its reach across all geographies. However, the online model simply paved over the older methods with technology, and perhaps even making things worse -- pushing course material to students, with no effective way to track how much they're learning, or even if they're paying attention. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) may have an answer for that, bringing learning and feedback in a very personal way to students.

Ricardo Diaz is a machine learning engineer. He works for a great company in Peru, and he's a graduate of no less than four Nanodegree programs! But just two years ago, it was a different story. He was still in Venezuela, struggling to learn new skills. He was short of money, and his prospects for making a full-time salary weren't great.

In January 2014, Stanford University professors Trevor Hastie and Rob Tibshirani (authors of the legendary Elements of Statistical Learning textbook) taught an online course based on their newest textbook, An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R (ISLR). I found it to be an excellent course in statistical learning (also known as "machine learning"), largely due to the high quality of both the textbook and the video lectures. And as an R user, it was extremely helpful that they included R code to demonstrate most of the techniques described in the book. If you are new to machine learning (and even if you are not an R user), I highly recommend reading ISLR from cover-to-cover to gain both a theoretical and practical understanding of many important methods for regression and classification. It is available as a free PDF download from the authors' website.

I'm sure you've heard of the incredible artificial intelligence applications out there -- from programs that can beat the world's best Go players to self-driving cars. The problem is that most people get caught up on the AI hype, mixing technical discussions with philosophical ones. If you're looking to cut through the AI hype and work with practically implemented data models, train towards a data engineer or machine learning engineer position. Don't look for interesting AI applications within AI articles. Look for them in data engineering or machine learning tutorials.

Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) combines OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies with Horn Logic rules of the Rule Markup Language (RuleML) family. Being supported by ontology editors, rule engines and ontology reasoners, it has become a very popular choice for developing rule-based applications on top of ontologies. However, SWRL is probably not go-ing to become a WWW Consortium standard, prohibiting industrial acceptance. On the other hand, SPIN (SPARQL Inferencing Notation) has become a de-facto industry standard to rep-resent SPARQL rules and constraints on Semantic Web models, building on the widespread acceptance of SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language). In this paper, we ar-gue that the life of existing SWRL rule-based ontology applications can be prolonged by con-verting them to SPIN. To this end, we have developed the SWRL2SPIN tool in Prolog that transforms SWRL rules into SPIN rules, considering the object-orientation of SPIN, i.e. linking rules to the appropriate ontology classes and optimizing them, as derived by analysing the rule conditions.

A decade ago, machine learning was simply a concept but today it has changed the way we interact with technology. Devices are becoming smarter, faster and better, with Machine Learning at the helm. Thus, we have designed a comprehensive list of projects in Machine Learning course that offers a hands-on experience with ML and how to build actual projects using the Machine Learning algorithms. Furthermore, this course is a follow up to our Introduction to Machine Learning course and delves further deeper into the practical applications of Machine Learning. In this blog, we will have a look at projects divided mostly into two different levels i.e.

Deep reinforcement learning is the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning. This field of research has been able to solve a wide range of complex decision-making tasks that were previously out of reach for a machine. Thus, deep RL opens up many new applications in domains such as healthcare, robotics, smart grids, finance, and many more. This manuscript provides an introduction to deep reinforcement learning models, algorithms and techniques. Particular focus is on the aspects related to generalization and how deep RL can be used for practical applications. We assume the reader is familiar with basic machine learning concepts.

Federated learning has become an exciting direction for both research and practical training of models with user data. Although data remains decentralized in federated learning, it is common to assume that the model updates are sent in the clear from the devices to the server. Differential privacy has been proposed as a way to ensure the model remains private, but this does not address the issue that model updates can be seen on the server, and lead to leakage of user data. Local differential privacy is one of the strongest forms of privacy protection so that each individual's data is privatized. However, local differential privacy, as it is traditionally used, may prove to be too stringent of a privacy condition in many high dimensional problems, such as in distributed model fitting. We propose a new paradigm for local differential privacy by providing protections against certain adversaries. Specifically, we ensure that adversaries with limited prior information cannot reconstruct, with high probability, the original data within some prescribed tolerance. This interpretation allows us to consider larger privacy parameters. We then design (optimal) DP mechanisms in this large privacy parameter regime. In this work, we combine local privacy protections along with central differential privacy to present a practical approach to do model training privately. Further, we show that these privacy restrictions maintain utility in image classification and language models that is comparable to federated learning without these privacy restrictions.

In this paper, we compare predictive models for students' final performance in a blended course using a set of generic features collected from the first six weeks of class. These features were extracted from students' online homework submission logs as well as other online actions. We compare the effectiveness of 5 different ML algorithms (SVMs, Support Vector Regression, Decision Tree, Naive Bayes and K-Nearest Neighbor). We found that SVMs outperform other models and improve when compared to the baseline. This study demonstrates feasible implementations for predictive models that rely on common data from blended courses that can be used to monitor students' progress and to tailor instruction.