Hinton was one of the people who invented backpropagation, which has let neural nets be as powerful as they are today. Somehow, despite his brilliance and intimate familiarity with backpropagation, his explanation of it is stunningly clear and simple. I'm thoroughly enjoying this course and recommend it to anyone who wants to build their own neural networks.
"If you can't explain something simply, you don't know enough about it. You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother." - Some German dude :)
C.S. Lewis? "Any fool can write learned language: the vernacular is the real test. If you can't turn your faith into it, then either you don't understand it or you don't believe it."
That would be Uncle Al.
I was watching his lectures and I saw this post when I take a break. He was talking about the ups and downs in the history of Neural Nets. As far as I understand from all these lectures we're on the verge of a new up phase. Neural Nets are meaningful when they are large and deep and training such nets becomes feasible, although not immediately.
I started taking the class but had to take a break due to other real life occurrences.
It was very enjoyable both content wise and style wise, for what my opinion count, I recommend it.