Virtual M.I.T.

Today was the last day of the regular weekday M.I.T./Stanford class schedule I've following. For the last month, Monday through Friday I've been pounding away at this:

both:

• MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming (Grimson and Guttag, originally taught Fall 2008)
• MIT 6.002 Circuits and Electronics (Agarwal, Spring 2007)

and on alternating days, either of these:

• MIT 6.042J Mathematics for Computer Science (Leighton and Van Dijk, Fall 2012)
• Stanford CS107 Programming Paradigms (Cain, 2012)

By "pounding away," I mean watching each lecture on Youtube, and taking detailed notes. 

It's the last day of this particular schedule, because I finished the 6.00 course (24 lectures in all). 

I've still got 4 lectures to go on Circuit, and I'm only half way through the Math course, and one third of the way through the Stanford course. I'll continue with those up after a week's break.

I'm going through a couple other M.I.T. comp sci courses besides these, but I've put the others on hold until I finish these.

The 6.00 course was fantastic. Absolutely worth it. Although it was introductory, I still learned quite a bit, and it was great to formalize the knowledge I already had. Professor Guttag wrapped it up today with a nice review and summary that featured a description of his own research, as an example of applications of computer science. 

Among other things, his research group was (as of 2008) using applied machine learning to build seizure warning devices for epileptics that recognize variations in the brain patterns of individuals (currently a difficult problem), and similar A.I.-based implanted defibrillators for people with cardiac disease. Fascinating!

His teaching partner, Eric Grimson, is one of the big researchers using A.I. to develop advanced medical imaging.

All of the professors I have for these courses (like Paul Fry for my Yale lit course) are very inspiring. Tom Leighton, for example, founded Akamai, a company that runs the servers that power a good chunk of the Internet, including (at least at one time) Facebook.  He was able to develop mathematical algorithms at M.I.T. that allowed for efficient distribution of load balancing of a gazillion web requests, and leveraged this into a fortune.

Likewise Anant Agarwal turns out to have founded the online learning platform edX. I had no idea until about week ago that his old Circuits course that I've been following has evolved into  one of the flagship courses on edX. He's a huge reason why M.I.T. is the head-and-shoulders leader of online web-based learning on the university level. Just one more amazing thing that has come out of that place.