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.