Lesson

After ~10 months of work, I finally managed to push the ball forward enough to reach GhostDriver 1.0.0. I won’t lie: it does feel great. It always is to see so much effort mutate into an achievement, even it is such only for me. Before I go any further though, I owe a massive THANK-YOU to the people that through contribution and / or issue reporting have helped me to build a releasable 1.0.0. In particular to Jim Evans, an awesome guy and a bit of a mentor for me: you ROCK Jim, and I think that is true, literally! ...

If the “mood” of the previous lessons was about Inference, I can only say that the current are about “smoothing”, “occam’s razor” and “perceptron”. 3 concepts that will remain with you even after having forgotten about all this (check it out below :-P). My notes of Lesson 5 My notes of Lesson 6 Enjoy the notes and, again, do Lesson 5, than complete the Homework, than study Lesson 6. UPDATE Sat 05 Nov 2011: I just finished putting down the notes of Lesson 6, and you can find the link above. ...

This week the ai-class was about Probability, Bayes Networks and Inference. For people like me, that have to find patches of free time to study this course, there is a good news: you can do Homeworks 2 just by studying the first of the 2 lessons. This can help to prioritise your schedule, and study the second lesson (that focuses on the “computation” over Bayes Networks) with a little bit more peace of mind. ...

Recently the online class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligente” has began. Prof. Sebastian Thrun and Prof. Peter Norvig, from Stanford University, are offering it for free. And I’m enjoying every minute of it. The idea is to trasport to the web the same course that they are teaching in person at Stanford. Almost simultaneously. One of the great notes from larvecode. It’s in my opinion a great experiment: there are 160,000 students, and will be interesting to see how it pans out. The two profs are doing their best to “leverage the scalability of the web”, instead of trying to retrofit the web into the class. That is smart. And gives them more chances of success. ...

Innovation is one of the major topics that all the Big companies speaks all the time about: how, what, when… Innovation? When the reality is of a little/medium size company, Innovation is easy: you don’t need to convince, motivate, move people. Teams with “Innovation in mind” just pop out from the ground… and a good manager just need to feed and support them. But when it comes to big companies, with budgets of millions, with Customers that are even bigger… it’s like trying to move an Elephant using one man and a cord. Mission Impossible. But. There are brave companies. Companies that plays the game smart. And those company lead Innovation. Apple? Yes, please! This article is indirectly about Apple: it’s about Pixar. It’s an interview to the Director of a different great movies in Pixar that brought “Innovation where looked impossible”: Phillip Bradley Bird (aka Brad Bird). ...