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The Large Scale Learning class notes

The large scale machine learning class I taught with Yann LeCun has finished. As I expected, it took quite a bit of time :-). We had about 25 people attending in person on average and 400 regularly watching the recorded lectures which is substantially more sustained interest than I expected for an advanced ML class. We also had some fun with class projects—I’m hopeful that several will eventually turn into papers.

I expect there are a number of professors interested in lecturing on this and related topics. Everyone will have their personal taste in subjects of course, but hopefully there will be some convergence to common course materials as well. To help with this, I am making the sources to my presentations available. Feel free to use/improve/embelish/ridicule/etc… in the pursuit of the perfect course.

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COLT and ICML registration

Sebastien Bubeck points out COLT registration with a May 13 early registration deadline. The local organizers have done an admirable job of containing costs with a $300 registration fee.

ICML registration is also available, at about an x3 higher cost. My understanding is that this is partly due to the costs of a larger conference being harder to contain, partly due to ICML lasting twice as long with tutorials and workshops, and partly because the conference organizers were a bit over-conservative in various ways.

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Remote large scale learning class participation

Yann and I have arranged so that people who are interested in our large scale machine learning class and not able to attend in person can follow along via two methods.

  1. Videos will be posted with about a 1 day delay on techtalks. This is a side-by-side capture of video+slides from Weyond.
  2. We are experimenting with Piazza as a discussion forum. Anyone is welcome to subscribe to Piazza and ask questions there, where I will be monitoring things. update2: Sign up here.

The first lecture is up now, including the revised version of the slides which fixes a few typos and rounds out references.