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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.

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NYU Large Scale Machine Learning Class

Yann LeCun and I are coteaching a class on Large Scale Machine Learning starting late January at NYU. This class will cover many tricks to get machine learning working well on datasets with many features, examples, and classes, along with several elements of deep learning and support systems enabling the previous.

This is not a beginning class—you really need to have taken a basic machine learning class previously to follow along. Students will be able to run and experiment with large scale learning algorithms since Yahoo! has donated servers which are being configured into a small scale Hadoop cluster. We are planning to cover the frontier of research in scalable learning algorithms, so good class projects could easily lead to papers.

For me, this is a chance to teach on many topics of past research. In general, it seems like researchers should engage in at least occasional teaching of research, both as a proof of teachability and to see their own research through that lens. More generally, I expect there is quite a bit of interest: figuring out how to use data to make predictions well is a topic of growing interest to many fields. In 2007, this was true, and demand is much stronger now. Yann and I also come from quite different viewpoints, so I’m looking forward to learning from him as well.

We plan to videotape lectures and put them (as well as slides) online, but this is not a MOOC in the sense of online grading and class certificates. I’d prefer that it was, but there are two obstacles: NYU is still figuring out what to do as a University here, and this is not a class that has ever been taught before. Turning previous tutorials and class fragments into coherent subject matter for the 50 students we can support at NYU will be pretty challenging as is. My preference, however, is to enable external participation where it’s easily possible.

Suggestions or thoughts on the class are welcome 🙂

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Patterns for research in machine learning

There are a handful of basic code patterns that I wish I was more aware of when I started research in machine learning. Each on its own may seem pointless, but collectively they go a long way towards making the typical research workflow more efficient. Here they are:

  1. Separate code from data.
  2. Separate input data, working data and output data.
  3. Save everything to disk frequently.
  4. Separate options from parameters.
  5. Do not use global variables.
  6. Record the options used to generate each run of the algorithm.
  7. Make it easy to sweep options.
  8. Make it easy to execute only portions of the code.
  9. Use checkpointing.
  10. Write demos and tests.

Click here for discussion and examples for each item. Also see Charles Sutton’s and HackerNews’ thoughts on the same topic.

My guess is that these patterns will not only be useful for machine learning, but also any other computational work that involves either a) processing large amounts of data, or b) algorithms that take a significant amount of time to execute. Share this list with your students and colleagues. Trust me, they’ll appreciate it.

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Somebody’s Eating Your Lunch

Since we last discussed the other online learning, Stanford has very visibly started pushing mass teaching in AI, Machine Learning, and Databases. In retrospect, it’s not too surprising that the next step up in serious online teaching experiments are occurring at the computer science department of a university embedded in the land of startups. Numbers on the order of 100000 are quite significant—similar in scale to the number of computer science undergraduate students/year in the US. Although these populations surely differ, the fact that they could overlap is worth considering for the future.

It’s too soon to say how successful these classes will be and there are many easy criticisms to make:

  1. Registration != Learning … but if only 1/10th complete these classes, the scale of teaching still surpasses the scale of any traditional process.
  2. 1st year excitement != nth year routine … but if only 1/10th take future classes, the scale of teaching still surpasses the scale of any traditional process.
  3. Hello, cheating … but teaching is much harder than testing in general, and we already have recognized systems for mass testing.
  4. Online misses out … sure, but for students not enrolled in a high quality university program, this is simply not a relevant comparison. There are also benefits to being online as well, as your time might be better focused. Anecdotally, at Caltech, they let us take two classes at the same time, which I did a few times. Typically, I had a better grade in the class that I skipped as the instructor had to go through things rather slowly.
  5. Where’s the beef? The hard nosed will want to know how to make money, which is always a concern. But, a decent expectation is that if you first figure out how to create value, you’ll find some way to make money. And, if you first wait until it’s clear how to make money, you won’t make any.

My belief is that this project will pan out, with allowances for the expected inevitable adjustments that you learn to make from experience. I think the critics miss an understanding of what’s possible and what motivates people.

The prospect of teaching 1 student means you might review some notes. The prospect of teaching ~10 students means you prepare some slides. The prospect of teaching ~100 students means you polish your slides well, trying to anticipate questions, and hopefully drawing on experience from previous presentations. I’ve never directly taught ~1000 students, but at that scale you must try very hard to make the presentation perfect, including serious testing with dry runs. 105 students must make getting out of bed in the morning quite easy.

Stanford has a significant first-mover advantage amongst top research universities, but it’s easy to imagine a few other (but not many) universities operating at a similar scale. Those that have the foresight to start a serious online teaching program soon will have a chance of being among the few. For other research universities, we can expect boutique traditional classes to continue for some time. These boutique classes may have some significant social value, because it’s easy to imagine that the few megaclasses miss important things in developing research areas. And for everyone working at teaching universities, someone is eating your lunch.

(Cross posted at CACM.)