IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course available free online. By the time the course began in October, 160,000 people in 190 countries had signed up for it. At the same time Andrew Ng, also a Stanford professor, made one of his courses, on machine learning, available free online, for which 100,000 people enrolled. Both courses ran for ten weeks. Such online courses, with short video lectures, discussion boards for students and systems to grade their coursework automatically, became known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

One of the most challenging problems in kernel online learning is to bound the model size and to promote the model sparsity. Sparse models not only improve computation and memory usage, but also enhance the generalization capacity, a principle that concurs with the law of parsimony. However, inappropriate sparsity modeling may also significantly degrade the performance. In this paper, we propose Approximation Vector Machine (AVM), a model that can simultaneously encourage the sparsity and safeguard its risk in compromising the performance. When an incoming instance arrives, we approximate this instance by one of its neighbors whose distance to it is less than a predefined threshold. Our key intuition is that since the newly seen instance is expressed by its nearby neighbor the optimal performance can be analytically formulated and maintained. We develop theoretical foundations to support this intuition and further establish an analysis to characterize the gap between the approximation and optimal solutions. This gap crucially depends on the frequency of approximation and the predefined threshold. We perform the convergence analysis for a wide spectrum of loss functions including Hinge, smooth Hinge, and Logistic for classification task, and $l_1$, $l_2$, and $\epsilon$-insensitive for regression task. We conducted extensive experiments for classification task in batch and online modes, and regression task in online mode over several benchmark datasets. The results show that our proposed AVM achieved a comparable predictive performance with current state-of-the-art methods while simultaneously achieving significant computational speed-up due to the ability of the proposed AVM in maintaining the model size.

Machines are eating humans' jobs talents. And it's not just about jobs that are repetitive and low-skill. Automation, robotics, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in recent times have shown they can do equal or sometimes even better work than humans who are dermatologists, insurance claims adjusters, lawyers, seismic testers in oil fields, sports journalists and financial reporters, crew members on guided-missile destroyers, hiring managers, psychological testers, retail salespeople, and border patrol agents. Moreover, there is growing anxiety that technology developments on the near horizon will crush the jobs of the millions who drive cars and trucks, analyze medical tests and data, perform middle management chores, dispense medicine, trade stocks and evaluate markets, fight on battlefields, perform government functions, and even replace those who program software – that is, the creators of algorithms. People will create the jobs of the future, not simply train for them, ...

How To Create a Website in a Weekend! (Project-Centered Course) State University of New York via Coursera (3 ratings) 8th May, 2017

Introduce yourself to the basics of data science and leave armed with practical experience extracting value from big data. This course teaches the basic techniques of data science, including both SQL and NoSQL solutions for massive data management (e.g., MapReduce and contemporaries), algorithms for data mining (e.g., clustering and association rule mining), and basic statistical modelling (e.g., linear and non-linear regression).

When Sahil Singla joined the social impact startup Farmguide, he was shocked to discover that thousands of rural farmers in India commit suicide every year. When harvests go awry, desperate farmers are forced to borrow from microfinance loan sharks at crippling rates. Unable to pay back these predatory loans, victims kill themselves – often by grisly methods like swallowing pesticides – to escape the threats and violence of their ruthless debt collectors. Singla and his team are tackling this social injustice with one unexpected but powerful tool: deep learning. Recent growth of computational power and structured data sets has allowed deep learning algorithms to achieve extraordinary results.

Andrew Ng, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence researchers, said in a Medium post that he is resigning as the head of AI initiatives at Baidu Corp., one of China's largest Internet companies. Ng said he said he will "continue to shepherd" the growth of AI in society, but provided few clues about what might come next. He portrayed his departure from Baidu as amicable, saying: "the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish." Ng has held a multitude of high-profile positions in Silicon Valley in the past decade, serving as a computer science professor at Stanford University, as head of the Google Brain project, and as chairman of Coursera, an online-education company that he co-founded with Stanford faculty colleague Daphne Koller.

Andrew Ng, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence researchers, said in a Medium post that he is resigning as the head of AI initiatives at Baidu Corp., one of China's largest Internet companies. Ng said he said he will "continue to shepherd" the growth of AI in society, but provided few clues about what might come next. He portrayed his departure from Baidu as amicable, saying: "the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish." Ng has held a multitude of high-profile positions in Silicon Valley in the past decade, serving as a computer science professor at Stanford University, as head of the Google Brain project, and as chairman of Coursera, an online-education company that he co-founded with Stanford faculty colleague Daphne Koller. I've completed a new book called "You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a Useless Liberal Arts Education."

We develop an online learning method for prediction, which is important in problems with large and/or streaming data sets. We formulate the learning approach using a covariance-fitting methodology, and show that the resulting predictor has desirable computational and distribution-free properties: It is implemented online with a runtime that scales linearly in the number of samples; has a constant memory requirement; avoids local minima problems; and prunes away redundant feature dimensions without relying on restrictive assumptions on the data distribution. In conjunction with the split conformal approach, it also produces distribution-free prediction confidence intervals in a computationally efficient manner. The method is demonstrated on both real and synthetic datasets.

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (Chinese: 吴恩达; born 1976) is a Chinese American computer scientist. He is the chief scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley. In addition, he is an adjunct professor (formerly associate professor) at Stanford University. Ng is also the co-founder and chairman of Coursera, an online education platform. Ng researches primarily in machine learning and deep learning.