Hello everyone, I hope you all had some chance to rest and enjoy the break, and that you are happy and healthy. Winter term classes start on Monday, January 8, 2023. 

Unfortunately, I came down with flu-like symptoms a couple days ago and now I have received a positive COVID-19 diagnosis. It seems to be a fairly mild case, although some days are better than others.  So here’s the plan, I need to isolate for around 5 days from when I stop being infectious, so the start of your course this week will be virtual. 

I will post up some short videos of my course introduction for you all for Monday. This will include the course overview, links and information for everyone for the term, and information about course assessments.  Most of this information is available already in the course outline on LEARN or on the course website.

For the first few topics on definitions of data, distance metrics, etc.,  I will direct you to my youtube channel for course last year. You can watch the “Week 1 Lectures” playlist which on these fundamental data topics since that content doesn’t really change.

My usual first lecture has two parts, (1) Course Logistics and (2) The Big Picture of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning:

  1. Course Logistics: If I can manage it I will try to do a live virtual lecture on Tuesday with the course logistics for everyone. Until then, please look at the course outline and website:
    • Course Outline: https://compthinking.github.io/DKMA/outline/
    • Note that the “lectures” part of the website is for last year, so most of the topics will follow this, but we will be squeezing some of the middle topics and adding more at the end this year.
    • If it looks like I’m unable to do that logistics lecture live on tuesday, I’ll try to record something or provide further information online. But please also feel free to raise your concerns on piazza, as private posts if needed, so we can go through them.
  2. The Big Picture of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: this includes how my research, and this course fits in with that. This does change year-to-year, and this year even more given all the exciting generative models for language and images showing up (e.g. DALLE and ChatGPT). So I’ll wait to give this lecture for the first live lecture, whenever that is. It will either be online Tuesday Jan 10 during the lecture time, or in person Monday Jan 16. It will depend how I’m doing Tuesday.

At this point, most questions people have are probably about course logistics, so I encourage you to post them to piazza, where I or the TAs can answer them in a more efficient manner. This will in fact me by advice for any communication over the term, rather than email, teams, carrier pigeon, twitter, etc. With the exception being of complaint about course staff or sensitive topics that are for me alone, then email or, only if urgent, a message on teams, is the best approach.

Be well and hope to see you all soon.

Mark Crowley, Associate Professor, UWaterloo ECE