Mav vs Stanford - Week 4

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 07, 2011

Stanford is offering 3 courses online: Introduction to Databases, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning. I plan on completing all the advanced tasks every week, and posting my thoughts / reflections every Sunday. This is week 2, Sunday October 23, 2011

Introduction to Databases

  • 1 unit, 4 quizzes, 0 assignments
  • I should just leave this as a permanent message: I still haven't watched any of the videos, I'm not sure how much longer this can keep up.

    Quiz 1: SQL Movie-Rating Query Exercises

    There are 4 tables, involving movies, reviewers and ratings. This quiz is similar to the quiz last week, except SQL is used this time. This took a bit of adjustment, but I am far more familiar with SQL than the relational algebra syntax, so this quiz was relatively easy.

    1 Attempt: 9/9

    Note: There was 4 quizzes, and they all seemed more or less the same, so I only did the first one.

    Machine Learning

  • 1 unit, 1 quiz, 1 assignment
  • Moving into meatier content, with non-linear regressions and smoothing parameters (regularization).

    Quiz 8: Neural Networks: Representation

    Neural networks are an interesting concept, by having a web of inputs it appears that a faster response can be generated to respond to a problem. Alternately, if there are a large number of inputs, they can be used to filter out some inputs through series of operations. This unit didn't talk too much about how to apply this to neural networks, and instead talked mostly about truth tables. The next unit is supposedly about "learning" though

    2 Attempts: 4.5/5, 5/5

    Assignment 3: Multi-class classification and neural networks

    The assignments are getting progressively harder, but my time management has failed me again. I only managed some weak attempts at most of the questions.

    Final: 20/100

    Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

    Previous week's homework: 93%

  • 2 units, ?? video questions, 1 homework assignment
  • Unit 7: Representation with Logic

    I'm blanking out, but this unit was about logic, stating which states are possible, given another state. Whether or not statements are valid or invalid. Overall, seemed relatively basic.

    Video Lecture Score: 68%

    Unit 8: Planning

    I didn't watch the videos, but the general concept is that events can be specified in advance, and they are defined within the plan.

    Video Lecture Score: 0%

    Homework 4

    More of the same, various logic problems with radio buttons and checkboxes

    What I've Learned

  • Start ML Earlier
  • The lecture material for machine learning isn't too bad, but the programming assignments seem to take over an hour. Definitely wasn't smart to start at 11 on Sunday