| When I took it we were encouraged to use Weka for the algorithm implementations themselves. This certainly allowed me (and I'd never so much as touched machine learning prior to taking the class -- I took it on a bit of a lark that wasn't related to my research at all) to focus on understanding the behavior of the algorithms rather than worrying about hacking them together. I'd agree that Tech has too few TAs for too many students, generally, for its graduate courses, but I don't know that other schools do a better job. A brief survey of the folks around my desk elicited howls of laughter at the notion of useful or accessible TAs in grad school. > I agree that Isbell is a joy to listen to - he is charismatic, entertaining, and I too enjoyed his anecdotes. However, I felt like you would only get something out of his lectures if you already knew what you were talking about. I think this assertion is, at best, too strong. A better assertion might be that his lectures depended on coming in with sufficient background. As I said, I came into the course with no experience with machine learning at all. On the other hand, I did have a fairly strong theoretical computer science, stats, and linear algebra background. I will admit that may have made me blind to things he was simply assuming with respect to educational background that were not actually safe to assume. That said, I still refer back to his primer on information theory (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~isbell/tutorials/InfoTheory.fm.pdf) when discussing work relying on it, so he certainly made some effort to fill in gaps as he discovered they were common. > When I think about the quality of the class, I think about how responsive the class is to the individual needs and progress of the student. For a graduate level course I feel a class clears this bar when it accurately and thoroughly documents the prerequisites. Now, I'm not saying Charles's class necessarily does this. As I said, I came in with a pretty strong background in what turned out to be more than sufficient, but with that background I personally felt his lectures were quite tractable, even assuming complete ignorance of ML itself. |