Hi. So many of you have signed up for this
course. It's heartening.
I'm glad you all want to learn web intelligence and big data with me.
Before I get into describing what this course is all about let me give a brief
overview of how we will proceed. this is really an overview course.
We will touch upon a lot of different material ranging from big data
technologies on the one hand, to machine learning and a little bit of AI on the
other. So, in the time that we have, we might
not have the opportunity to go into great detail in any of these topics.
However, I have arranged for two guest lectures in this course.
One on large-scale graph databases, one on a new way of doing AI using statistics
and logic together. Both of which we'll delve quite deep into
topics which normally most of us might not understand in great depth.
But that will give you an idea of things going to their logical conclusion and
depth at a graduate level. But for the most part, this course will
remain an overview course. You should all be able to get an idea of
what web intelligence is about, what big data technologies are.
How they all, all fit together, and an overall sense of unity which will help
you learn much more from a variety of different sources, as you learn each of
these topics in more depth in other courses.
Each week, or each unit will be followed by a quiz and a homework assignment and
some of these homework assignments will require you to do programming or data
analysis. So, be prepared for that even if you're
not very familiar with programming. try to get a little familiar with Python,
SQL and basic programming techniques in order for you to understand basic ideas
in this course. Couple of more points, please do complete
the survey. Let's get to know each other, if only in
the aggregate. I promise to publish the results of the
survey as soon as it's done. So that we all know where the bulk of
people doing this course are from, in terms of their background and
motivations. Last, but not least.
The first couple of weeks of this course are recorded with a rather slow speech,
deliberately, so I'm not really going to be speaking as fast as I am right now in
the next few weeks. It'll go much slower and some of you
might find it. Tedious, but my experience has been that
it's useful. All of you get to know my speech much
better and then when I speed up later on it's less of a problem for everybody.
those of you who find it slow can fast forward the speech.
To 2x, and most people wont have any trouble with that too.
Finally, this week is a short introduction to the material, the
motivation, the philosophy behind this course, so it barely has less than 30
minutes of lecture time. Starting next week however, it'll be a
full one hour plus of video material and homework and a quiz going with it.