This top rated MOOC from Stanford University is the best place to start. In this class, you will learn about the most effective machine learning techniques, and gain practice implementing them and getting them to work for yourself. More importantly, you'll learn about not only the theoretical underpinnings of learning, but also gain the practical know-how needed to quickly and powerfully apply these techniques to new problems. This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning and statistical pattern recognition. The course will also discuss recent applications of machine learning, such as to robotic control, data mining, autonomous navigation, bioinformatics, speech recognition, and text and web data processing.

Many social services including online dating, social media, recruitment and online learning, largely rely on \matching people with the right people". The success of these services and the user experience with them often depends on their ability to match users. Reciprocal Recommender Systems (RRS) arose to facilitate this process by identifying users who are a potential match for each other, based on information provided by them. These systems are inherently more complex than user-item recommendation approaches and unidirectional user recommendation services, since they need to take into account both users' preferences towards each other in the recommendation process. This entails not only predicting accurate preference estimates as classical recommenders do, but also defining adequate fusion processes for aggregating user-to-user preferential information. The latter is a crucial and distinctive, yet barely investigated aspect in RRS research. This paper presents a snapshot analysis of the extant literature to summarize the state-of-the-art RRS research to date, focusing on the fundamental features that differentiate RRSs from other classes of recommender systems. Following this, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for future research on RRSs, with special focus on (i) fusion strategies to account for reciprocity and (ii) emerging application domains related to social recommendation.

We consider the problem of batch multi-task reinforcement learning with observed context descriptors, motivated by its application to personalized medical treatment. In particular, we study two general classes of learning algorithms: direct policy learning (DPL), an imitation-learning based approach which learns from expert trajectories, and model-based learning. First, we derive sample complexity bounds for DPL, and then show that model-based learning from expert actions can, even with a finite model class, be impossible. After relaxing the conditions under which the model-based approach is expected to learn by allowing for greater coverage of state-action space, we provide sample complexity bounds for model-based learning with finite model classes, showing that there exist model classes with sample complexity exponential in their statistical complexity. We then derive a sample complexity upper bound for model-based learning based on a measure of concentration of the data distribution. Our results give formal justification for imitation learning over model-based learning in this setting.

In this 28-video series, you will learn important concepts and technologies to build your end-to-end machine learning applications on Azure.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology Interest Group is your destination for discussions, online resources, education, and networking with …

> Science's COVID-19 coverage is supported by the Pulitzer Center. In a normal summer, Appledore Island, a 39-hectare outcrop 12 kilometers off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, becomes a classroom. Students from high school to graduate level live in close quarters, eat in a communal dining hall, and work shoulder to shoulder to explore the biology of the shore and waters in 18 courses organized by the Shoals Marine Laboratory. But this summer, with the pandemic surging, students have stayed home. Instead, a skeleton staff on Appledore is streaming field trips and dissections of fish and invertebrates and setting up cameras to gather data for students. Rather than leading students around the island, coastal restoration ecologist Gregg Moore from the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham, hauls a backpack full of equipment: “a dual modem with two different cellular carriers, a signal-boosting directional antenna, and a large DC power source,” he says. The equipment allows him to teach 12 remote students—twice the course's usual enrollment—basic techniques of coastal ecology. Moore's is just one of hundreds of lab and field courses forced online by COVID-19—“a seismic shift for those who were not already involved in distance or online education,” says Martin Storksdieck, a science education researcher at Oregon State University, Corvallis. Some researchers worry students will miss out on certain practical and problem-solving skills and won't be able to judge whether the hands-on work of a scientist is a good fit for them. But instructors are developing high-tech ways to simulate the field and lab experiences. “I would say [these courses] are not virtual,” says Jennifer Seavey, director of the Shoals lab. “They are real.” And some advantages are emerging. By lowering geographical and financial barriers, Seavey says, “Virtual field courses are democratizing fieldwork.” The shift has taken ingenuity. “Professors must get creative and use a combination of what is available,” including online videos and free or commercially available online labs, says Mildred Pointer, a physiologist at Howard University who is working on a fall course in general biology. No single tool meets all their needs, Pointer says. As the pandemic gained momentum, emails flew among the leaders of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. Many U.S. geology majors must take a “capstone” field course to graduate. The cancellation of more than three-quarters of these courses jeopardized graduation for many majors. So the association invited instructors to develop learning objectives that did not depend on students doing fieldwork. It also compiled online exercises to help the 29 field courses that have moved online this summer. Lessons range from “Orienteering in Minecraft” to “Geology of Yosemite Valley,” which includes a 43-stop Google Earth tour with photos and embedded text. Like Moore, geoscientist Jim Handschy wanted to give remote students “as close to the real experience as possible.” He runs Indiana University's Judson Mead Geologic Field Station in Montana, which had enrolled 60 students before classes were canceled in March. He and a few instructors visited each outcrop in their course plan, filmed the rocks and landscape, and captured magnified views of samples. Each week, the class delves deeper into the rock layers and their history. For their final project, students digitally map a 3100-hectare landscape. Shannon Dulin, a geologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who just finished teaching a field course, sees the value of learning how to survey a landscape without setting foot on it. On their class evaluations, her students said they gained unexpected skills. “And these are skills they are going to need on the job,” she adds, as geologists are increasingly being asked to evaluate sites they don't visit. In other fields, hands-on learning takes place in labs. Typically, students work in pairs and share equipment, “so there are a lot of issues about virus transmission,” says Heather Lewandowski, a physicist at the University of Colorado (CU), Boulder. At her university this fall, lab exercises as diverse as building an electrical circuit or analyzing solar flare data will most likely be completely remote. Luckily, physics already had a foot in the virtual lab world—especially at CU. There, back in 2002, Nobel laureate Carl Wieman developed the Physics Education Technology (PhET) Interactive Simulations project to provide “games” that teach students basic physics concepts. The PhET web portal now has 106 physics-based simulations and another 50 or so for other disciplines. It became a go-to place this spring for faculty shifting to online teaching; traffic increased fivefold, says Director Katherine Perkins. In addition, several universities have adopted a handheld device called the iOLab that rents for $50 a semester. With it, students can measure magnetism, light intensity, acceleration, temperature, gravity, and atmospheric pressure, and do basic physics experiments at home. “They like that we trust them and are not just giving them instructions,” says iOLab inventor and physicist Mats Selen at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Lewandowski and her colleagues surveyed physics instructors and students about their experiences and posted their findings on arXiv, the physics preprint server, on 2 July. Respondents said online labs work best when projects are open-ended, and online class meetings are kept small. They complained about technical difficulties, students having unequal access to the internet and materials, and longer prep times for both students and instructors. But they reported they could meet most key learning objectives, Lewandowski says, even though “there are lots of things we can't replicate in remote experiments,” such as such as building vacuum chambers or troubleshooting equipment. Some institutions decided this spring that virtual just wouldn't do. The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, simply canceled its summer courses. “MBL courses are world-renowned for the intensity of the hands-on nature of the lab work,” says Director Nipam Patel. Students spend long hours with famous faculty and do their own projects using organisms collected locally. “We felt that it would be exceedingly difficult to replicate these experiences as a virtual lab course.” Other institutions will try for a mix of in-person and virtual labs. Suely Black, chemistry chair at Norfolk State University, expects only half of his students will be in lab each week this fall, while the other half will be in online classes analyzing data and writing reports. “The crisis has caused us to more critically evaluate what activities students must experience in the lab setting,” he says. Similarly, this fall, organic chemistry students at the University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor, will rotate into the lab in small groups, giving each a taste of the hands-on experience. Personal protection equipment is standard for this course and all the work is done in hoods with excellent air exchange, so “they are really fully protected,” says UM biochemist Kathleen Nolta. Storksdieck, an advocate of online learning, questions the value of smelling fumes or using a pipette. “We have to ask whether all the hands-on taught so far was all that great,” he says. Dominique Durand, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University, says after he put a master's program in biomedical engineering completely online 5 years ago, he concluded that solving problems was more important than hands-on experience. And University of California, Santa Cruz, ecologist Erika Zavaleta thinks virtual courses will open fieldwork to far more students. “There are things you can do online that you can't do in person,” she adds, such as visiting more places than possible by driving. Even so, Handschy laments that his geology students will not have the 12-hour-a-day immersive interactions with each other and faculty that past classes have had. Natalie White, a rising junior at UNH who took Moore's course on Appledore last year, agrees: “You don't have all the time in between when you walk around the island and can ask impromptu questions.” Appledore Island is the source of some her fondest memories. “I think they are missing out on the community.”

If you don't know, Keras is a both powerful and easy-to-use Python library for developing and evaluating deep learning models. It wraps the efficient numerical computation libraries like Theano and TensorFlow and allows you to define and train neural network models in a few short lines of code, which is just awesome. In this course, you will learn how to build an end-to-end Python machine learning project using Keras and tune a deep learning model and neural network. The best part of this course is that n the course, we will walk through every line of code so you'll be able to understand the model and the process.

Pylearn2 is a machine learning library that has been designed to facilitate research projects. While it is admittedly not very easy to use and demands a good grasp of ML from the user, on the upside, it provides great flexibility to a researcher and is quite fast. About: While there are many resources to learn Pylearn2, this blog focuses on aspects of the library that are difficult to pick up on – getting your data in and making predictions out. To get data in, you need to write a Python wrapper class for your dataset, which it provides for, and which can further be used with multiclass sets. The blog has also provided for a hack in order to get predictions produced by Pylearn2.

Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute announced the launch of AI Academy for Marketers, an online education platform that helps marketers understand, pilot and scale artificial intelligence. AI Academy for Marketers is designed for marketing professionals and students at all levels, and largely caters to non-technical audiences, meaning registrants do not need backgrounds in analytics, data science or programming to understand and apply what they learn. The Academy features deep-dive Certification Courses (3 – 5 hours each), along with dozens of Short Courses (30 – 60 minutes each) taught by leading AI and marketing experts. The courses are complemented by additional exclusive content, including: live monthly Ask Me Anything sessions with instructors, the Answering AI series of quick-take videos that provide simple answers to common AI questions, keynote presentations from the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON), and AI Tech Showcase product demos from leading AI-powered vendors. New content will be regularly added to the platform, and all members get access to a private online community Slack group to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing with their peers.

AWS | Databricks ML Dev Day - Every enterprise today wants to accelerate innovation by building Data and ML into their business. However, most companies struggle with preparing large datasets for analytics, managing the proliferation of Data and ML frameworks, and moving models in development to production. In this virtual workshop, we’ll cover best practices for enterprises to use powerful open source technologies to simplify and scale your Data and ML efforts. We’ll discuss how to leverage Apache Spark™, the de-facto data processing and analytics engine in enterprises today, for data preparation as it unifies data at massive scale across various sources. You’ll also learn how to use Data and ML frameworks (i.e. TensorFlow, XGBoost, Scikit-Learn, etc.) to train models based on different requirements. And finally, you can learn how to use MLflow to track experiment runs between multiple users within a reproducible environment, and manage the deployment of models to production on Amazon SageMaker. Join this virtual workshop to learn how Unified Data Analytics can bring Data Science, Business Analytics and engineering together to accelerate your Data and ML efforts. This virtual workshop will give you the opportunity to:Learn how to build highly scalable and reliable pipelines for analyticsDeeper insight into Apache Spark and Databricks, including the latest updates with Delta LakeTrain a model against data and learn best practices for working with ML frameworks (i.e. - TensorFlow, XGBoost, Scikit-Learn, etc.)Learn about MLflow to track experiments, share projects and deploy models in the cloud with Amazon SageMakerWe will use Zoom for a virtual meeting environment. Your Zoom link will be sent to you upon registration.  We look forward to seeing you on July 29th.  Slalom Privacy Policy - Wednesday, July 29, 2020