PALO ALTO, Calif. — A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.
The course is one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world, the university is announcing on Tuesday.
For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries.
講師は世界的に有名な人工知能の専門家 Sebastian Thrun および Peter Norvig の2人だ。Thrun 博士は 2005 年にスタンフォード大生や教授を率いてロボットカーの製作を行なった。カリフォルニア砂漠で未舗装の道を 132 マイル走らせようというペンタゴンがスポンサーのプロジェクトに挑戦した。最近ではグーグルの秘密プロジェクト、カリフォルニアの公道を10万マイル以上走行する自律走行車の開発にも携わった。
The instructors are Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, two of the world’s best-known artificial intelligence experts. In 2005 Dr. Thrun led a team of Stanford students and professors in building a robotic car that won a Pentagon-sponsored challenge by driving 132 miles over unpaved roads in a California desert. More recently he has led a secret Google project to develop autonomous vehicles that have driven more than 100,000 miles on California public roads.
Norvig 博士は元 NASA の科学者。今はグーグルの研究開発担当で、人工知能に関する代表的教科書の著者でもある。
Dr. Norvig is a former NASA scientist who is now Google’s director of research and the author of a leading textbook on artificial intelligence.
The computer scientists said they were uncertain about why the A.I. class had drawn such a large audience. Dr. Thrun said he had tried to advertise the course this summer by distributing notices at an academic conference in Spain, but had gotten only 80 registrants.
数週間のち、人口知能向上協会の専務理事 Carol Hamilton にEメールで知らせた。それを彼女があちこち転送してくれたおかげで、知らせはウイルスのように広まった。
Then, several weeks ago he e-mailed an announcement to Carol Hamilton, the executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. She forwarded the e-mail widely, and the announcement spread virally.
There has also been some discussion at Stanford about whether making the courses freely available would prove to be a threat to the university, which charges high fees for tuition. Dr. Thrun dismissed that idea.
“I’m much more interested in bringing Stanford to the world,” he said. “I see the developing world having colossal educational needs.”
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がらりと変わったオンライン環境
MIT のコンピュータ学者 Hal Abelson は、2002 年に始まった教育教材を公開する初期の開発を支援した。スタンフォード大のコースを見ると、オンライン世界がいかに急速に変化してきたか分かるという。
Hal Abelson, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who helped develop an earlier generation of educational offerings that began in 2002, said the Stanford course showed how rapidly the online world was evolving.
“The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” he said. “Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”
Feross Aboukhadijeh: I decided to do this after hearing about Google Instant. I thought that instant search for YouTube videos would be really cool. My roommate bet me that I couldn’t code it up in an hour. It ended up taking 3 hours, so he won the bet.
Aboukhadijeh: I think YouTube Instant makes sense if you’re looking for a serendipitous video browsing experience. It’s not as useful as Google Instant if you know exactly what you’re looking for, since you’re shown distracting YouTube videos on the way to your destination. But I think this is perfect for many Internet users. 🙂
Aboukhadijeh: I’m a Junior in the Stanford CS program. I’m interested in Internet technology, building websites, and computer security. I really enjoy building products that entertain and delight people, like YouTube Instant.
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Kafka:他にはどんなことをやってるの?
Kafka: Besides this, what’s your favorite project you’ve worked on?
Aboukhadijeh: I’ve been working at Facebook as an software engineer intern for the summer. Right now, we’re building something really cool that’s going to be released soon, but I can’t share any details because it’s top secret! 🙂
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Kafka:YouTube API を利用したの? 反応はどう?
Kafka: I’m assuming you used the YouTube API to build this, correct? Any reaction from them so far?
Aboukhadijeh:YouTube API と YouTube 検索提案を利用して YouTube Instant を作った。グーグルからは今のところ何の反応もない。でも気に入ってくれると思うよ。YouTube CEO はとても気に入って、Twitter で仕事のオファーをくれた。
Aboukhadijeh: I built YouTube Instant using a combination of the YouTube API and scraping YouTube search suggestions. No reaction from Google so far, but I think they’ll probably get a kick out of it. The YouTube CEO actually offered me a job on Twitter, he liked it so much.
I initially ran into some issues when Google automatically blocked my server for making too many repeated requests, but I just rewrote the site to query YouTube directly using Javascript on the client-side. This means that all the magic happens in each visitor’s browser, so it’s faster and Google can’t block it.
スタンフォード大生の Feross Aboukhadijeh は、最近発表されたばかりの Google Instant を利用して、YouTube ビデオのためのリアルタイム検索エンジンを作った。それが YouTube CEO の Chad Hurley の目にとまった。
Stanford student Feross Aboukhadijeh, in a nod to the recent unveiling of Google Instant, has created a real-time search engine for YouTube videos — and it’s caught the attention of YouTube CEO Chad Hurley.
Aboukhadijeh, who goes by the Twitter handle FreeTheFeross, sent a message back to find out if Hurley was serious about the offer — because, after all, this is the Internet. It looks like Hurley was, indeed, quite serious.
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YouTube Instant とは
Aboukhadijeh は YouTube Instant を Y Combinator の Hacker News[Digg や Reddit によく似たアグリゲーションサイト]で発表した。YouTube Instant は Google Instant と同じような振る舞いをする検索エンジンだ。探しているビデオ名をタイプすると、即座に反応してビデオを探し出すのだ。
Aboukhadijeh announced the launch of YouTube Instant on Y Combinator’s Hacker News feed, a news aggregation site similar to Digg and Reddit. It behaves much the same way Google Instant does — as a viewer types in the video they are looking for, the engine guesses the video and begins playing it immediately.
YouTube, which was acquired by google four years ago for about $1.65 billion, might finally turn profitable this year according to some analyst predictions.
YouTube の確認がとれ次第アップデートする予定。
We’ve reached out for confirmation from YouTube and will update when we hear back.
Ge Wang は Smule の共同設立者で、Ocarina や Leaf Trombone の開発者だ。今日の講義では iPhone メタフォール、感性豊かなソーシャルメディアの創造などについてタップリと語る。アプリのアイデアを探しているひとは、是非ともこの講義を聞くべきだ。
Ge Wang, co-founder of Smule and developer of Ocarina and Leaf Trombone, spoke at length today on metaphors for the iPhone and creating expressive social mediums for the phone. If you’re looking for inspriation for your own apps, you should definitely check out this lecture.
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ラップトップオーケストラなど、音楽のインタラクティブな側面に関心を持っていた Ge Wang は iPhone SDK をきっかけに iPhone への関心を深めていく。
One note about the class website. The content will remain available for most of the summer, but towards the end of the summer it will be taken down and the materials will no longer be available. It would be a good idea to download all the materials you need now so that when the website is cleaned you’re not left missing stuff. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
秋学期にもまた授業を再開したいと考えているが、詳しいことは夏の終わり頃までにはこのサイトに発表する予定。授業が iTunes U や SCPD で同じように公開されるかどうかは目下のところ不明。それも夏の間には発表できると思う。
We are expecting to run the class again in the Fall quarter, keep an eye here for more details as that time draws near. At the moment we don’t know if it will be available on iTunes U or SCPD again, we’ll post more over the summer.
We hope you all have had a good time in this class and that you’ll continue on the path of building some amazing iPhone applications. We really enjoyed the quarter! Take care and stay in touch.
C と Objective-C をミックスして用いるときに効力を発揮する。C と Objective-C が自由にミックスして使えるため、ローレベルでは純粋 C にすることが可能で、このためオーバーヘッドを減らすことができる。相互乗り入れ自由なことを「無料の高速道路ブリッジ」(Toll-Free Bridging)に例える。
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ネットワーク上の個人データ:手順
アドレスブックがもっと威力を発揮するのは、ネットワーク上の個人データを読み込むときだ。
Social Networking Website の個人データは、次のような手順で読み込む。(18 分ごろから)
Step 1: Search
ダウンロードしたデータから個人名を探す。
Step 2: Update
アドレスブックを更新する
Step 3: Display
結果をソートして表示する
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ネットワーク上の個人データ:デモ
Social Networking Website から個人データを読み込むデモは 35 分ごろから。