End of Week 1 and Welcome Community TAs!
Congratulations on hanging on through the first week of class! Starting a new class is always difficult - there are brand new terms to learn, new concepts to get your head around, and for our programming assignment, new software and code bases to grapple with. This will only get better, as we spend the rest of the class fleshing out Bayesian networks and Markov networks; already, some of you have asked on the forums about how to perform inference and learning on PGMs, which we'll spend a good bit of time on in the rest of the class. If you've been busy learning the ropes of Octave and our submission system, you'd also be happy to know that we'll be using the functions you wrote for this assignment in the rest of the class, so the time you took to understand the code and get everything to work was time well spent.
I also wanted to take a moment to thank PGM's 18 Community TAs: John, Miguel, Elena, Misty, Mikhai, Michael, Hans, Michalis, Andrey, Alicja, Anna, Shahar, John, Hari, Ian, Zarutskiy, Willem and Binesh! These students did exceptionally well last time we taught PGM and have been invited back to help make sure you survive as well. I'm sure you've met them already in the forums, and they have already proven to be a great asset to the course. Thank you, Community TAs.
We hope you've enjoyed the first week, and that your appetite has been whetted for what we'll cover in the remaining weeks!
Daphne
Sun 30 Sep 2012 3:50:00 PM PDT