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MIT Video lectures - Introduction to Algorithms
- dinkumthinkum 16y agoOpenCourseWare is great but I sort of feel like it's been so hyped over the years. Think about how long its been around, now look at how few courses have videos or any content worth mentioning at all. I could understand some of the other disciplines lagging behind in content but really it's the computer science stuff that is quite sparse. They have a big list but most of the courses just have some assignments without solutions or some lecture notes, which are available from most university web sites anyway.
- rick_2047 16y agoI agree with you on that point. The nptel by iits and iiscs is much better than ocw. I say this because I have used both and found that the nptel videos cover the subject more broad while ocw courses lack in number as well as some in depth stuff.
- riffer 16y agoQuestion: would people be interested in summarized transcripts for these lectures? The reason I ask is because I know I'm not going to watch 20 hours of the videos, and when I take a look at the transcripts they are good, but they are also long. It would take a while to even skim them. I've been doing some work around machine text summarization, and it seems like these transcripts would be a great candidate to put it to work. What do people think? Would you like summaries of the transcripts of these lectures? EDIT: Thanks for the positive feedback, I'll submit them as a story here in 24 hours (right now I'm supposed to be getting ready for a big dinner tonight).
- lawn 16y agoAbsolutely.
- JeanPierre 16y agoBeing a person that studies this lecture (but not on MIT), I would love to have summarized transcripts as long you don't remove examples which would help in understanding how things work. Nothing is better than looking at a problem in different perspectives to understand it better. I'm also pretty sure that there are many people here who want to (or at least, should) refresh old courses and algorithms.
- riffer 16y agoI see your concern. I'm approaching this as an experiment, so I'm not entirely sure how it'll work in terms of your concern about examples and other context. Let's see how it plays out.
- rottencupcakes 16y agoThe thing about 6.046 is that a lot of the lectures are taken straight from CLRS chapters. Reading the book is equivalent to what you're saying. When you start having classes without textbooks, some upper level algorithms classes at MIT have what they call 'scribes' to do almost exactly what you're planning on doing. For example, here is the Advanced Algorithms home page (http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.854/current/ http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.854/current/) and here for example are the scribe notes on Min-Cost Flows. http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.854/06/scribe/s11-minCostFlow.pdf http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.854/06/scribe/s11-minCostFlow... Worthwhile searching around if you're looking for this kind of thing.
- awa 16y agoPeteris Krumins posted notes on his blogs, http://www.catonmat.net/category/introduction-to-algorithms http://www.catonmat.net/category/introduction-to-algorithms
- naner 16y agoI've been doing some work around machine text summarization Does this mean developing your own code or playing around with something like libots or Copernic Summarizer?
- godDLL 16y agoHere are an excerpt from Lecture 1 transcript http://dpaste.com/252190/plain/ http://dpaste.com/252190/plain/, and a version of it bastardized by MacOS X Summarize service set to up to produce a very short paragraph summary below. > There is always going to be some point n_o where for everything larger the Theta(n^2) algorithm is going to be cheaper than the Theta(n^3) algorithm not matter how much advantage you give it at the beginning in terms of the speed of the computer you are running on. Or maybe not so much bastardized. That is to say – it can probably be done.
- serverdude 16y agoI had an idea that may be more helpful for you (given your automatic summarizing technical knowhow) and just shot you an email. Please respond to my email if interested.
- nrbafna 16y agoYes, it would be immensely useful. The reason being our proxy/firewall in the university doesn't allow to stream or download videos. On the other hand, generalizing this, making text copies on videos would enable search not only on the metadata of the video, but its content as well. Imagine trying to search for a movie by a particular dialogue you remembered. Other trivial case would to be to generate subtitles for the video, or feeding the output to a language translator enabling me to watch, say an academic video spoken in chinese without available subtitles.
- Tichy 16y agoI don't get it - concentration span not sufficient to read a book anymore, so you watch a movie instead. Except you don't have the patience to watch a movie, so you end up reading the transcripts?
- feral 16y agoThat's a good set of lectures. My girlfriend recently did several as she was learning about CS as a postgrad, and found them very useful. They, and many more, are also available on 'iTunes university' from within the iTunes interface. The Stanford CS courses that are up are also well worth a look; there's a good Machine Learning course up there. The only issue is that the videos often aren't properly edited for the Internet. They don't strip out the class administrative parts, and the lectures would go a lot better with a navigable text index to allow you skip to different parts of the video. The Khan Academy is also worth a look as a similar project. With a little more care and attention to editing and presenting for the web, this could have a big impact on education.
- msie 16y agoAw, no video for the "Ethics, Problem Solving" lecture? Now I'm really curious!
- uberc 16y agoI had the good fortune of taking this course from Prof. Leiserson a good many years ago -- and ended up having him as my Masters thesis advisor. His ethics pep talk, which is a mainstay of all his courses, are about not cheating on the take-home exams. I still remember him saying to the class, in a fatherly, earnest way: "You've got to learn to make friends with that feeling in the pit of your stomach" and to face the fear rather than give in to the temptation to cheat. One of the MIT CS department's great teachers.
- bigmac 16y agoYeah, I'd like to see someone's lecture notes or something. "Mandatory Attendance"...
- jakerocheleau 16y agoNow I know what I'm doing with my Sunday afternoon.
- pshirishreddy 16y agoIMHO I feel that CLRS is a great book. I consider it to be my bible of algorithms. I have viewed almost all the videos the course ware apart from the last few which constitute of advanced topics. :)
- poet 16y agoYou can't replace CLRS as a reference, but I recommend the following free draft if you're looking for an algorithms text to start out with: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html.
- roshanr 16y agoI'm going to take this opportunity to plug my OpenCourseWare app for boxee. You can enjoy a lot of what OpenCourseWare has to offer (including this course) from the comfort of your couch (Currently the app has courses from MIT, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and UCLA).
- mariorz 16y agowhy would this ever get downvoted? a link would be nice though.
- anthonyb 16y agoDoesn't look like there is one - maybe it's a boxee specific thing. This was the closest I could find: http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/06/14/opencourseware-on-boxee/ http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/06/14/opencourseware-on-boxee/ but it's a bit light on detail.
- roshanr 16y agoUnfortunately, boxee doesn't have a way to link to apps. The best I have is a link to my site - http://www.roshweb.net/projects/ http://www.roshweb.net/projects/ - which is also very light on details. I need to work on getting more information up there.
- mitjak 16y agoNot to hijack the thread too much, but are there good resources on learning about algorithm correctness, complexity, recurrence relations, automata and proving techniques? At the moment I'm not doing so well in the proof by induction department, and the course material at UToronto is quite lousy.
- huherto 16y agoI just watched the first lecture. What is a recitation assignment? I am not familiar with the american school system.
- rottencupcakes 16y agoThere are two types of classes, Lectures and Recitations. Lectures are large (hundreds). Recitations are small (~20). The recitation assignment is simply which recitation you are in.
- c00p3r 16y agoBeware: 2/3 of content is a hardcore math - algorithm behavior analysis and theorem's proofs. What good with this course - they teach you the way of thinking and how to approach problems. So, don't skip proofs even if you don't have appropriate math skills. But it is course is easy, compared to machine learning course form Stanford. That math is a real nightmare. ^_^
- spcmnspff 16y agoYou can get a lot of CS lecture series on Academic Earth including MIT's Intro to Algorithms: http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science There are other disciplines there too: http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/ http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/
- olalonde 16y agohttp://videolectures.net/ http://videolectures.net/ has some interesting lectures as well.
- readtodevelop 16y agoI think those lectures can be summarized a lot if the audience has some advanced background. The authors could put some tag in the content, revealing what type of content is about background and core material. Going directly at the core is great when you know well the background material.