MIT Video lectures - Introduction to Algorithms
ocw.mit.edu
ocw.mit.edu
The reason I ask is because I know I'm not going to watch 20 hours of the videos, and when I take a look at the transcripts they are good, but they are also long. It would take a while to even skim them.
I've been doing some work around machine text summarization, and it seems like these transcripts would be a great candidate to put it to work.
What do people think? Would you like summaries of the transcripts of these lectures?
EDIT: Thanks for the positive feedback, I'll submit them as a story here in 24 hours (right now I'm supposed to be getting ready for a big dinner tonight).
I'm also pretty sure that there are many people here who want to (or at least, should) refresh old courses and algorithms.
When you start having classes without textbooks, some upper level algorithms classes at MIT have what they call 'scribes' to do almost exactly what you're planning on doing.
For example, here is the Advanced Algorithms home page (http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.854/current/) and here for example are the scribe notes on Min-Cost Flows. http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.854/06/scribe/s11-minCostFlow...
Worthwhile searching around if you're looking for this kind of thing.
Does this mean developing your own code or playing around with something like libots or Copernic Summarizer?
> There is always going to be some point n_o where for everything larger the Theta(n^2) algorithm is going to be cheaper than the Theta(n^3) algorithm not matter how much advantage you give it at the beginning in terms of the speed of the computer you are running on.
Or maybe not so much bastardized. That is to say – it can probably be done.
On the other hand, generalizing this, making text copies on videos would enable search not only on the metadata of the video, but its content as well. Imagine trying to search for a movie by a particular dialogue you remembered. Other trivial case would to be to generate subtitles for the video, or feeding the output to a language translator enabling me to watch, say an academic video spoken in chinese without available subtitles.
http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science
There are other disciplines there too:
My girlfriend recently did several as she was learning about CS as a postgrad, and found them very useful.
They, and many more, are also available on 'iTunes university' from within the iTunes interface. The Stanford CS courses that are up are also well worth a look; there's a good Machine Learning course up there.
The only issue is that the videos often aren't properly edited for the Internet. They don't strip out the class administrative parts, and the lectures would go a lot better with a navigable text index to allow you skip to different parts of the video. The Khan Academy is also worth a look as a similar project.
With a little more care and attention to editing and presenting for the web, this could have a big impact on education.
His ethics pep talk, which is a mainstay of all his courses, are about not cheating on the take-home exams. I still remember him saying to the class, in a fatherly, earnest way: "You've got to learn to make friends with that feeling in the pit of your stomach" and to face the fear rather than give in to the temptation to cheat. One of the MIT CS department's great teachers.
What is a recitation assignment? I am not familiar with the american school system.
The recitation assignment is simply which recitation you are in.