Thursday, December 15, 2011

A Noble Laureate In The Waiting - Reinventing Education With Khan Academy & AI Class

It's been an honor to be a student of the first batch of AI Class and ML Class; a mind-boggling 10 week mental boot camp. I have learned so much in the past few weeks that it will be a long long time before I get to comprehend all these cumulative knowledge.

These guys have redefined education and there is probably a noble prize in the waiting. Last century, Norman Borlaugh saved billion of lives from starvation. These guys are the Borlaugh of this century; educating million minds out of scientific illiteracy (age no bar). Great work !!



The book that inspired me to join the AI class:
Books I am currently reading (learning):
Alex Tabarrok's post which made me join the course:
  • Coming Education Revolution - Thank you Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen for Marginal Revolution; you guys have been my purveyors of knowledge. 
"Stanford’s ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course will be offered free to anyone online this fall. The course will be taught by SebastianThrun (Stanford) and PeterNorvig (Google, Director of Research), who expect to deal with the historically large course size using tools like Google Moderator.
In 2003, I argued that professors were becoming obsolete, giving a 10 to 20 year time for a big move to online education. Later, I pointed out that the market was moving towards superstar teachers, who teach hundreds at a time or even thousands online. Today, we have the Khan Academy, a huge increase in online education, electronic textbooks and peer grading systems and highly successful superstar teachers with Michael Sandel and his popular course Justice, serving as example number one."

Consequences of attending these classes:
  • Max officially hates Andrew, Sebastian & Peter for cutting down on his play time.
  • Bought a Roomba vacuum cleaner and have already developed a profound respect for it. 
  • My reading habits have dropped exponentially. 
  • I feel lousy still driving my grey Prius (Google driver-less car was a grey Prius and here I am still driving it in the notorious NJ traffic). 
  • It's been a humbling experience - made me realize first hand how much I don't know.
  • It's been a humiliating experience - made me realize how difficult it is to learn something new even if I am good at something else.  I spent the entire thanksgiving weekend trying to understand particle filters. There is a very good chance that I wouldn't forget this thanksgiving until my last breathe.
  • Most importantly the discussion forums has been a power house of ideas, debates, frustrations, fights, humor et al., a quasi-renaissance in itself. 
  • For the n-th time, I have started looking at the world around me in a completely different perspective. 
  • Bottom-line, in the past few weeks, I have been living that famous words of Leonardo da Vinci - "The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding."
  • But yet there is that little voice inside me keeps reminding of another important words of wisdom from him... "I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."
Sebastian Thrun, AI class professor's TED talk on google driverless cars:



List of new online "free" courses offered by Stanford starting January 2012. Sign-up now!! I feel like a kid in a candy story :-)


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