Stanford's "autonomous" helicopters teach themselves to fly

This is incredibly cool work -- it's clear how this is a more general approach than hard-coding a bunch of rules about how to fly a particular helicopter, under particular assumptions about the environment and the desired maneuvers.

In the future, I wonder if it would be possible to improve the learning algorithms to the point that no human expert is even needed: you could toss the helicopter up in the air, and have it essentially figure out how to fly the machine before it hit the ground.

This work is also a nice counterpoint to those who question the value of the work being done in academic computer science. I think there is more innovation and long-term value in these sorts of projects than in a dozen typical Web 2.0 social networking startups.

Stanford class on machine learning by Andrew Ng, 20 lectures.