Udacity – how to build your own search engine over even a robotic car

Last year I successfully attended “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” bay Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Sebastian and Peter are pioneers on the field of free online education and gave an awesome experience to a lot of online students.

A few days ago I received this Email from Sebastian asking to promote his latest venture udacity:

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your interest in AI Class and congratulations to those who
successfully graduated. We were totally amazed that over 23,000 students
made it all the way to the end in a Stanford graduate-level class.

Due to popular demand, we are teaching a follow-up class: AI for Robotics at www.udacity.com . Also due to popular demand, we now have a programming environment, so you can develop and test software. Our
goal is to teach you to program a self-driving car in 7 weeks. This is a topic very close to my heart, and I am eager to share it with you. (This class builds on the concepts in ai-class, but ai-class is NOT required).

We are also launching an introduction to programming class, where students will learn to program a search engine, without any prior
knowledge of programming. This will be great for students new to computer science.

We are doing this with a new university: Udacity. In the next months, we will offer an entire computer science curriculum through Udacity, and offer certification services so that an entire degree can be obtained online.

I would love to see you in class again! I would also love if you could help us spread the word and recruit students. Udacity is an experiment in democratizing education, in making free education available for
everyone in the world. It can only succeed if you join us and help spread the word.

Sebastian

If you want to learn how to build your own search engine or how to build a robotic car, just register for the corresponing course on udacity.com.

Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 – starts in 2 weeks

Hackers around the world, here are some good news

Facebook is starting its second (now annual) Facebook Hacker Cup. Get your coke, beer or even glas of redwine next to you, arrange some brain-food and get in a relaxed postion. There will be some code to be written in the next weeks. That’s a challenge all AI-Class Students shall be interested in.

If you are willing to submit your solutions to different hacking problems, you may qualify for the first of three online rounds. The competition commences with a 72-hour Qualification Round on January 20, 2012 at 4:00 PM PT and ends on January 23, 2012 at 4:00 PM PT. You will be presented with three problems and if you correctly solves at least one problem, you will advance to Online Round 1. All online Rounds will be occuring in January 2012 with world finals held at Facebook’s headquarters in California, registration started January 4, 2012.

Facebook will pay to fly and accommodate the top 25 hackers from the third online round out to their californian campus and there is more to win:

$5,000 USD and title as world champion to the top hacker
$2,000 for second place
$1,000 for third
$100 for fourth through 25th
Awesome t-shirts for the top 100 hackers coming out of the second online round

Details:
Continue reading “Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 – starts in 2 weeks”

New Stanford courses online – enroll now

For all of you interested in education, Stanford’s new online courses maybe worth a look. I like the entrepreneur classes and I will try to attend as many courses as possible. How  about you?

 

Computer Science

Entrepreneurship