Learning Machines 101

In this episode, we briefly review Item Response Theory and Bayesian Network Theory methods for the assessment and optimization of student learning and then describe a poster presented on the first day of the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in December 2015 in Montreal which describes a Recurrent Neural Network approach for the assessment and optimization of student learning called “Deep Knowledge Tracing”. For more details check out:

www.learningmachines101.com and follow us on Twitter at: @lm101talk

In this episode we discuss just one out of the 102 different posters which was presented on the first night of the 2015 Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. This presentation describes a system which can answer simple questions about images. Check out: www.learningmachines101.com for additional details!!

This is the third of a short subsequence of podcasts providing a summary of events associated with Dr. Golden’s recent visit to the 2015 Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. This is one of the top conferences in the field of Machine Learning. This episode reviews and discusses topics associated with the Introduction to Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation Tutorial presented by Professor Richard Sutton on the first day of the conference. Check out: www.learningmachines101.com to learn more!! Also follow us at: "lm101talk" on twitter!

Welcome to the 43rd Episode of Learning Machines 101!We are currently presenting a subsequence of episodes covering the events of the recent Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. However, this weekwill digress with a rerun of Episode 22 which nicely complements our previous discussion of the Monte Carlo Markov Chain Algorithm Tutorial. Specifically, today wediscuss the problem of approaches for learning or equivalently parameter estimation in Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithms. The topics covered in this episode include: What is the pseudolikelihood method and what are its advantages and disadvantages?What is Monte Carlo Expectation Maximization? And...as a bonus prize...a mathematical theory of "dreaming"!!! The current plan is to returnto coverage of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in 2 weeks on January 25!! Check out: www.learningmachines101.com for more details!

This is the second of a short subsequence of podcasts providing a summary of events associated with Dr. Golden’s recent visit to the 2015 Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. This is one of the top conferences in the field of Machine Learning. This episode reviews and discusses topics associated with the Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) Inference Methods Tutorial held on the first day of the conference. Check out: www.learningmachines101.com to listen or download this podcast episode or download the transcripts! Also visit us at LINKEDIN or TWITTER. The twitter handle is: LM101TALK

This is the first of a short subsequence of podcasts which provides a summary of events associated with Dr. Golden’s recent visit to the 2015 Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. This is one of the top conferences in the field of Machine Learning. This episode introduces the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference and reviews the content of the Morning Deep Learning Tutorial which took place on the first day of the conference. Check out: www.learningmachines101.comfor additional supplementary hyperlinks to the conference and conference papers!!

In this episode we introduce a very powerful approach for computing semantic similarity between documents. Here, the terminology “document” could refer to a web-page, a word document, a paragraph of text, an essay, a sentence, or even just a single word. Two semantically similar documents, therefore, will discuss many of the same topics while two semantically different documents will not have many topics in common. Machine learning methods are described which can take as input large collections of documents and use those documents to automatically learn semantic similarity relations. This approach is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) or Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Visit us at: www.learningmachines101.com to learn more!

In this episode we discuss how to solve constraint satisfaction inference problems where knowledge is represented as a large unordered collection of complicated probabilistic constraints among a collection of variables. The goal of the inference process is to infer the most probable values of the unobservable variables given the observable variables. Concepts of Markov Random Fields and Monte Carlo Markov Chain methods are discussed. For additional details and technical notes, please visit the website: www.learningmachines101.com

Also feel free to visit us at twitter: @lm101talk

In this episode, we examine the problem of developing an advanced artificially intelligent technology which is capable of tracking knowledge growth in students in real-time, representing the knowledge state of a student a skill profile, and automatically defining the concept of a skill without human intervention! The approach can be viewed as a sophisticated state-of-the-art extension of the Item Response Theory approach to Computerized Adaptive Testing Educational Technology described in Episode 37. Both tutorial notes and advanced implementational notes can be found in the show notes at: www.learningmachines101.com.

In this episode, we discuss the problem of how to build a smart computerized adaptive testing machine using Item Response Theory (IRT). Suppose that you are teaching a student a particular target set of knowledge. Examples of such situations obviously occur in nursery school, elementary school, junior high school, high school, and college. However, such situations also occur in industry when top professionals in a particular field attend an advanced training seminar. All of these situations would benefit from a smart adaptive assessment machine which attempts to estimate a student’s knowledge in real-time. Such a machine could then use that information to optimize the choice and order of questions to be presented to the student in order to develop a customized exam for efficiently assessing the student’s knowledge level and possibly guiding instructional strategies. Both tutorial notes and advanced implementational notes can be found in the show notes at: www.learningmachines101.com .