Tea break: What is your life like at this moment?

looking out at a beautiful sunset over grassy fields

It really calms me:) so nice! I imagined this sentence promptly. you're an interesting person Cool! I think you are a successful person in your beautiful Life.:) a scientist who like AI! I'm amazed:D Nice!

here it is autumn with colorful trees,I love it because of so many colors around me and in this autumn today we had snow! and it was amazing because it is unusual in our area having snow.if nobody is beside me I will sing a song for myself with laud voice between trees:D

I still don't know Who and what I am.I just know I want to be as good as I can:) and I love AI online Class it is an opportunity for me being in a place having more progress more excite happenings and knowing about many many different Ideas. Cheers.

I live in the Bay Area and work in the online advertising industry. Probably a little older than Sebastian Thrun. At work, we're mucking with targeting algorithms and recommend engines, so when I heard about the AI class, it sounded too fascinating to miss. Several homeworks and one exam later, it has been even more fascinating than I imagined. And the model helicopter that was discussed in the Reinforcement learning class was so cool that I bought one myself. Now just to program it to fly upside down :)

Hi, Goldenskies and everybody,

This is coming to be usual. I thought the course was hosted on Amazon servers, and that they could deal with such things as a DOS attack. Well, it has been good to me, I was really late for this homework!

What's my life like? I'm fairly sure many of you fall into the group of working-nursing-cooking-working-studying men, so you already know. This really summarizes much of my daily life! Excuse me for keeping the hidden part for myself :-)

I'm a shy adult with many responsibilities interested in going back to school after a long time away from a classroom. I enrolled in more than one Stanford course, which is crushing me. I abandoned all hope of a certificate of accomplishment recently, which made me quite sad. I'm using these courses to increase my basic understanding of the material and as a stepping stone to comp sci. courses and related fields. There's some good crossover between Prof. Andrew Ng's course on machine learning and this one on AI.

I think AI has a bright future, but funding, research and development in the past 2 decades might not have been what it could or should be. Pedagogical issues aside, this course has already changed my life in a positive way.

I'm happy to meet you and for your thread.

I am a middle-aged high school math teacher in the United States with degrees in music, math, computer science and secondary education. I have never found a subject that I didn't want to learn about, and this format of online courses from Stanford is a great way for me to keep learning while still being able to meet other time commitments, like grading papers, going to orchestra rehearsals, and walking my dog. I love the topic, and I love the class.

Hi everyone,

I've just arrived home from work on bike. I live in Stgo, Chile, its 31°C outside. I am watching Santa Lucia hill (a big hill full of trees) through my window shades, while studying AI. I do game programming for a living, love to learn new things, yoga (sports in general), vegan food, music (watched Morphine playing recently, a dream come true) and reading (just started Ballard's "Hello America"). This class is great, I really admire lots of students which's answers had help me understand the most difficult bits. Thank you all.

Thirty-something Pole living in Brussels. Java developer by trade. I became interested in AI at the end of my studies and since then I've been planning to revisit the subject and learn more. I bought and started reading AIMA a few months ago but it wasn't until the class that I became really involved. Thanks a lot to the professors and whoever at Stanford came up with the idea of online courses, it's a fantastic feeling to be learning what I've always wanted to learn. Next (belgian) beer is on me! :-)

I am a husband, father of three, BS in Physics, MS & recent PhD in microelectronics, and I design satellites. It was during my dissertation that I discovered I REALLY wanted to be a roboticist. Maybe someday ...

I'm a 20 year old undergraduate student from an obscure country north of Australia. I think I learn a lot here compared to my university's 4-month course time. Though I have a really sh*tty internet connection speed (about 20 kb/s at normal hours and 50-80 kb/s at 1-3 a.m.), I'm not gonna give up, because this course and the other 2 courses is maybe one of the best gifts I've ever had in my life. So, thank you professors, aiclass team, and all the people here on aiqus.

I am a high school student from Norway that's not sure of what I'm gonna study when this year is over. I can't say no and are currently doing waaay to much. I'm getting very fond of AI and I am thinking of studying it in USA.

i'm actually here in Silicon Valley working as a professional mobile apps manager, but I might as well as be anywhere else, since I do not have the time to attend the lectures in real time..

I still have hopes of doing the official AI graduate, so my costs are really up there. Perhaps i should have it fore free first... so that's my own AI heuristic i need to adopt !

I'm probably the same age as Sebastian -- but I need to get his coffee to get that energy level he has !

The good is I am getting a avalanche of material from the 2 professors.... i mean, textbook, youtube + 3 other Stanford course sites... the bad is that these HW are so vague and the examples are so simple but doesn't give me a clear way to leverage thru the twists of the HW....

But I love AI still !

In Athens - Greece and ready to go to bed (40 yrs old, father of one boy, full time employed). I was hoping to submit my answers for HW6 tonight but the servers are still down (past 1am for me now).

I learned quite a lot so far from AI although I am sometimes finding it a bit theoretical. Next year I am thinking to either follow nlp or machine learning.

Winter is here. Snow is all over the place, the trees, the cars. The roads. Twenty minutes from now I'll be commuting to my work in a public bus, studying grim snowy landscape outside through frosty window, looking for a signs that I'm nearing my destination, where I'll continue to develop data-collection-processing-storing-throwing-to-the-trash-bin-with-beautiful-infographics project for one infamous platform. I'm almost like it.

In common with KryptoCleric, I have a BS in Physics - but I am a father of one, and no longer married.

Lots of people put me in the "software developer" box, but I also do system admin and network admin.

Silicon Valley is my home for the last couple of decades.

I have always been interested in AI - years ago, when there were book clubs (with catalogs on PAPER!) I bought a few books on AI and related subjects, but this is the first time it all really clicks. With this class, I can understand how an AI program solved the "blocks world".

Like many others, I find too many of the questions to be too open to interpretation. But, I am happily learning, and the cost and risk are low, so I keep going. A uniquely helpful part of this course is to be able to play the lectures over and over. Wish every class had that capability!

Going into the class I feared that it would all be abstract or else purely mathematical, so I am really happy to find that it connects to the real world. I find myself looking at the techniques and recognizing how some of them seem similar to the ways that children learn, and others are similar to the ways that I think and evaluate situations. Having attended some talks by Google, it is interesting to see the correspondence between the techniques in this course, and the way Google does things - for example, voice recognition on Android.

The course has increased my use of Facebook, and has given me things to talk to friends and family about - being in a class with 150,000 other people! And, that logical-but-weird Monty Hall problem.

My neighbor (a previous Stanford grad) explained the Monty Hall outcome this way: if you look at it as either choosing 1 door, or choosing both of the other 2 doors, then the probability of 2/3 for the new door makes sense.

I'm a mathematician working as scientific manager for a doctoral school at university. Married and with two kids (very soon: three) I live in a small town in Germany. We have a dog ...

Private interests include long distance running, reading, programming and actively working in many school projects on mathematical education. I also like origami, but I'm not at all an expert on that. I take part in this course to find out how difficult these online courses are and if your doctoral students can learn something from them (answer: definitely ;-).

If you have some spare time to kill:

"Loneliness of a long distance runner" (A.Sillitoe)

"What I talk about when I talk about running" (H.Murakami)

Both books combine tow of my favourite hobbies ;-)

Don't laugh, but I teach middle school robotics, in Florida. One of the classes I teach is (very optimistically) titled 'Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Robotics' (it's a package that someone upstairs decided to buy), but it's a lot of fun for the kids. I took this course because it sounded so fascinating and it is, but between the 10-12 hour days that I usually work, and 7 FIRST LEGO League robotics teams in tournament season, this course is killing me. Of course, it's rejuvenating me at the same time, except when I feel SOO stupid because I have no background for this; I started as a geologist, so I am quite comically underprepared. I have to say that I would much prefer for there to be no ranking on any certificate, I don't want to destroy my principal's faith in me. I am learning so much that the grade is irrelevant to me (or I'd have stopped long ago), but possibly not to others.

Of course, after this course, I will be dumping the package and writing completely new lessons, so that the kids get at least the appropriate vocabulary.

I really, really appreciate all the help that everyone gives here. It makes such a difference to have a resource like this. Thanks for starting this thread!

In northern New Jersey overlooking the Manhattan skyline, wondering where my career goes from here, and how to be a better programmer.

I am an Australian software developer in Manhattan working for an education not-for-profit staring out my office window at the chilly, teeming, New York metropolis. I somehow missed AI during my Computer Science college years (in the 90s) but I've always found the concepts fascinating. I recently started tinkering with electronics building mini-robots using micro-controllers (like Arduinos) and I'm hopeful this course might help me to give one of these a brain. It's been tremendously stimulating to participate in the course and I hope to be able to apply the theory to my work. I had some trouble over Thanksgiving dinner convincing friends and family of the probabilities behind the Monty Hall problem but brushing up on probabilities made a recent trip to a casino much more interesting.

I'm a full-time software engineer on the US east coast, with a 45-minute commute, a wife, and two small children, and I've been pretty useless in the past week due to bronchitis with pneumonia. I'm getting better now. But by the time the servers come up, it's unlikely that I will have any more time to spend on this class before midnight UTC = 7 pm US eastern. Grumble, grumble. I'm just glad there's a policy to drop the two lowest homeworks.

I'm an undergrad from India, majoring in Math. I enrolled because the course seemed interesting (and it is - really really interesting!). I've been having a lot of fun, going back and trying to rigorously derive many of the results presented here...

I also enrolled for the db-class and ml-class, but sadly, between ai-class and my other courses here, I haven't got time to view more than a few videos in either of them. Rather optimistically, I've now enrolled for a whole bunch of new classes (2012ml-class, game-theory class, algo-class...) starting in January or so. :)

Anyway, I've got my finals tomorrow, so I guess I shouldn't be sitting and trawling through aiqus right now....

I'm a high school senior living in Midwest USA, and I'm planning on majoring in Environmental Engineering. I decided to take this class simply because it was free and sounded interesting, and I'm glad I did! The first day of snow was yesterday, and I'm loving/hating it. Above all I am a developing follower of Jesus Christ, and my life goal is to love as he loves.