Want To Learn Artificial Intelligence? Good.

In a little more than a month, tens of thousands of people around the world will attend a class on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford. Registration for this class is still open for both class ‘tracks’. The “basic” track is simply watching lectures and answering quizzes, or a slightly more advanced version of MIT OpenCourseware or Khan Academy. The “advanced” track is the full class, requires homework and exams, and aspires to Stanford difficulty.

With thousands of people taking this class, there’s bound to be a few study groups popping up around the web. The largest ones we’ve seen are /r/aiclass on Reddit and the stack overflow style aiqus. The most common reply to ‘what language should I learn from this class?’ is Python, although there’s an online code repo that has the text’s working code in Lisp, Java, C++ and C#.

If AI doesn’t float your boat, there are two more classes being taught from Stanford this fall: machine learning and introduction to databases. Any way you look at it, you’re getting to take a class from one of the preeminent instructors in the field for free. Do yourself a favor and sign up.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in. You can stop now.

Open Source Digital Camera

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Those brainy folks over at Stanford are working on an open source digital camera. This is an effort to advance what they call “computational photography”. Basically they’re looking to combine some of the functionality of Photoshop or Gimp right into the camera. One example they discuss is utilizing an algorithm to even out the light levels from one side of the picture to the other. Another trick they’ve already accomplished in the lab is increasing the resolution of full motion video. They take a full resolution photo once every few frames and use the computing power of the camera to incorporate that information into the low-res frames around it.

We like the idea of being able to get at the firmware that runs on our digital cameras. Going with open source would certainly provide that access, but cost will be an issue. The Stanford team hopes to produce a model of what they now call Frankencamera that sells for “less than $1000”.

[via crave]

Autonomous Helicopter Learns Autorotation


Stanford’s autonomous helicopter group has made some impressive advancements in the field of autonomous helicopter control, including inverted hovering and performing aerobatic stunts. The group uses reinforcement learning to teach its control system various maneuvers and has been very successful in doing so. One of their latest achievements was teaching the bot the emergency landing technique autorotation. Autorotation is used when a helicopter’s engine fails or is disengaged and works by changing the collective pitch to use the airflow from descent to rotate the blades. The group has more flight demonstrations on their YouTube channel.

[via BotJunkie]