ML book

We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.

—Rutherford D. Roger

The amount of information is enormous nowadays and it is continuously growing. See resources to observe only a tiny fraction of machine learning content available on the Web. Isn’t it enough? Why should we create one more piece of content?

There were a lot of Holy Wars about education and all around it. Leaving them aside, I personally formulate the main purpose of education as follows:

The Fundamental Goal of Education

Create conditions allowing students to acquire knowldedge and skills at the desired level in the shortest possible period of time.

Our attempt will technically rely on Jupyter book, an open-source tool for building publication-quality books and documents from computational material.

Jupyter-book demo

To introduce the capabilities of Jupyter book along with some methodological ideas I wrote the e_book. For now it consists only of one chapter devoted to the Euler number.

The main features:

• interactive quizzes (taken “as is” from here);

• mix of narrative and executable content as it is usually done via markdown and code cells in Jupyter notebook;

• pictures and visualizations (sometimes interactive);

• available online on any device.

Hopefully, during this course we’ll write something similar about machine learning.

Course assessment

Activity	Final scores
Attendance	\(10\%\)
Practice	\(10\%\)
Midterm	\(10\%\)
Jupyter book project	\(30\%\)
Final exam	\(40\%\)

Project team construction

Successive completion of the project requires effective team collaboration. The team should consist of several students with different roles:

• technical writer

• author of executable content

• designer of interactive plots

• designer of quizzes

• the most useless… project manager

The goal of every team is to create a nicely looking section in the ML book.

Technical writer

• writes clear and neat narrative content in Markdown

• looks for consistency with all other types of content

• translates some Russian texts into English if necessary

Author of executable content

• writes executable content in Jupyter notebook

• suggests ideas of python calculations and static plots which would enrich the narrative content

• searches for existing datasets and visualizations

• tries different models of machine learning

Designer of interactive plots

• uses plotly or pywidgets or something else to create interactive visualizations

• searches for places where it would be quite beneficial to insert interactive elements

• suggests ideas of quizzes which could be solved by investigating of interactive content

Designer of quizzes

• searches for ideas of single/multiple choice and numeric quizzes

• writes quizzes using Jupyterquiz in a separate Jupyter notebook

• encodes the quiz bodies and inserts them into main content

Project manager

• tracks the progress of each member of the team

• checks for consistency of all types of content, notations and cross-references to other parts of the book

• searches for different sources of information

• communicates with PMs of teams which work on related topics

• communicates with BDFL

The main tool