Caltech Offers Online Course with Live Lectures in Machine Learning

Anyone anywhere can watch one of Caltech's most popular courses on machine learning, complete with live lectures, beginning April 3. Every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the spring term, Yaser Abu-Mostafa, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Caltech, will deliver lectures for his Learning From Data class live on Caltech's Ustream channel. Course material will be available on Dr. Abu-Mustafa's website, so that no matter where a viewer is, they can experience the class—both the lectures and the coursework.

"The idea is that if people in the furthest reaches of the world want to learn the material and have the discipline to go through it, we are giving them the opportunity to experience this course in real time," Abu-Mostafa says. "We will be interested to see how this experiment goes."

With 18, one-hour lectures scheduled, the course will cover basic theory, algorithms, and applications of machine learning—the discipline that deals with enhancing the ability of computational systems to learn from data, enabling them to improve their performance with experience. Examples of machine learning applications include systems used by banks to determine whether to approve applications for credit cards based on financial data, and the Netflix system that tries to anticipate how much a given subscriber will enjoy a particular movie. 

For more information on the course and to register as an online participant, click here. Recorded lectures and course materials will also be available for download as an iTunes U course for viewing on Apple mobile devices here.