I leaned over the shoulder of a student in the library. She was quietly working with headphones in, and completely focused. What caught my attention is that she would continually lift her phone up over the textbook, and then jot something down on the paper to her left. It was a motion and process that she repeated at least seven times before I headed over to see what was going on. As I got closer I could see that it was a math textbook, and her paper was filled with equations, problems, and steps.

In recent years, there has been a lot of focus on adaptive e-learning, fueled by the advances of machine learning and artificial intelligence. As the one-size-fits-all approach of e-learning loses its appeal and online course attrition rates continue to rise, there is a move toward more personalized and adaptive learning to engage learners and achieve better learning outcomes. Personalized and adaptive learning has the ability to change learning content or the mode of delivery on the fly and to provide real-time feedback to learners. The origin of adaptive learning came from the research of intelligent tutoring systems, recommender systems and adaptive hypermedia. The advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques have helped the plethora of platforms and tools that support adaptive learning flourish.

Those who learn how to make machines that exhibit intelligence today are tomorrow going to lead the next technological revolution, be part of the most cutting-edge companies and stand a chance to disrupt almost all industries through their skillsets.

The terms'data science' and'analytics' have had a great surge in usage for a long time now. Data has become the driving force of all established companies these days. In this ever-evolving sector of technology, success and failure stories are found daily. But only a few of them are as inspiring as the story of Ankush Bhandari, a tiffin service provider who became a data scientist. Ankush Bhandari completed his Master in Economics at Fergusson College, Pune, and started his entrepreneurial venture – Kaivalya Foods – as a tiffin service provider.

Einstein once said that if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll live its whole life thinking it's stupid. What you may not know is that he was referring to the public educational system and the one size fits all approach to teaching. Although more than a century passed since he said this, traditional models of education still exist till this day and still insist on standardized teaching techniques, despite their inability to deliver the best results. More and more learners -- in the academic and business world -- don't find these models challenging and engaging, so they're searching for alternatives, they want more personalized learning experiences. Personalized learning is the tailoring of learning environments with the primary focus on learners and how they experience the process of knowledge acquisition.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to complete Andrew Ng's Machine Learning MOOC taught on Coursera. It serves as a very good introduction for anyone who wants to venture into the world of AI/ML. I always wondered how amazing this course could be if it were in Python. I finally decided to re-take the course but only this time I would be completing the programming assignments in Python. In these series of blog posts, I plan to write about the Python version of the programming exercises used in the course.

Kalman filter is a key tool for time-series forecasting and analysis. We show that the dependence of a prediction of Kalman filter on the past is decaying exponentially, whenever the process noise is non-degenerate. Therefore, Kalman filter may be approximated by regression on a few recent observations. Surprisingly, we also show that having some process noise is essential for the exponential decay. With no process noise, it may happen that the forecast depends on all of the past uniformly, which makes forecasting more difficult. Based on this insight, we devise an on-line algorithm for improper learning of a linear dynamical system (LDS), which considers only a few most recent observations. We use our decay results to provide the first regret bounds w.r.t. to Kalman filters within learning an LDS. That is, we compare the results of our algorithm to the best, in hindsight, Kalman filter for a given signal. Also, the algorithm is practical: its per-update run-time is linear in the regression depth.

The 5 courses in this University of Michigan specialization introduce learners to data science through the python programming language. This skills-based specialization is intended for learners who have a basic python or programming background, and want to apply statistical, machine learning, information visualization, text analysis, and social network analysis techniques through popular python toolkits such as pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn, nltk, and networkx to gain insight into their data. Introduction to Data Science in Python (course 1), Applied Plotting, Charting & Data Representation in Python (course 2), and Applied Machine Learning in Python (course 3) should be taken in order and prior to any other course in the specialization. After completing those, courses 4 and 5 can be taken in any order. All 5 are required to earn a certificate.

On a balmy summer's day in San Francisco, Milena Marinova is sitting on the roof terrace of the offices of Pearson, a company in the midst of a radical transformation from publishing powerhouse to digital-education platform, wrapped in a gray shawl and explaining how she plans to build advanced, deep-learning algorithms that could educate the next generation of students. This is no easy task. With millions of students using its education-software, Pearson has amassed "terrabytes" of data from student homework and even textbooks that have been digitized, data that Marinova is now pulling together to build software that can automatically give students feedback on their work like a teacher would. Instead of just telling them that an answer is right or wrong, a future update to Pearson's math homework tool will give more detailed feedback on how they went wrong in the steps taken to get an answer, Marinova told Forbes in an interview. Pearson is starting with math because the topic is relatively easy to structure and digitize.

We present a unified framework for Batch Online Learning (OL) for Click Prediction in Search Advertisement. Machine Learning models once deployed, show non-trivial accuracy and calibration degradation over time due to model staleness. It is therefore necessary to regularly update models, and do so automatically. This paper presents two paradigms of Batch Online Learning, one which incrementally updates the model parameters via an early stopping mechanism, and another which does so through a proximal regularization. We argue how both these schemes naturally trade-off between old and new data. We then theoretically and empirically show that these two seemingly different schemes are closely related. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the utility of of our OL framework; how the two OL schemes relate to each other and how they trade-off between the new and historical data. We then compare batch OL to full model retrains, and show how online learning is more robust to data issues. We also demonstrate the long term impact of Online Learning, the role of the initial Models in OL, the impact of delays in the update, and finally conclude with some implementation details and challenges in deploying a real world online learning system in production. While this paper mostly focuses on application of click prediction for search advertisement, we hope that the lessons learned here can be carried over to other problem domains.