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Comment by riffer | Hacker News Reader

Question: would people be interested in summarized transcripts for these lectures?

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).

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The thing about 6.046 is that a lot of the lectures are taken straight from CLRS chapters. Reading the book is equivalent to what you're saying.

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.

Peteris Krumins posted notes on his blogs, http://www.catonmat.net/category/introduction-to-algorithms

Thanks for linking! :)

thanks for making the notes :)

Being a person that studies this lecture (but not on MIT), I would love to have summarized transcripts as long you don't remove examples which would help in understanding how things work. Nothing is better than looking at a problem in different perspectives to understand it better.

I'm also pretty sure that there are many people here who want to (or at least, should) refresh old courses and algorithms.

I see your concern. I'm approaching this as an experiment, so I'm not entirely sure how it'll work in terms of your concern about examples and other context. Let's see how it plays out.

Here are an excerpt from Lecture 1 transcript http://dpaste.com/252190/plain/, and a version of it bastardized by MacOS X Summarize service set to up to produce a very short paragraph summary below.

> 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.

Yes, it would be immensely useful. The reason being our proxy/firewall in the university doesn't allow to stream or download videos.

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.

I don't get it - concentration span not sufficient to read a book anymore, so you watch a movie instead. Except you don't have the patience to watch a movie, so you end up reading the transcripts?

I've been doing some work around machine text summarization

Does this mean developing your own code or playing around with something like libots or Copernic Summarizer?

I had an idea that may be more helpful for you (given your automatic summarizing technical knowhow) and just shot you an email. Please respond to my email if interested.

Absolutely.

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