MIT’s Introduction to Algorithms, Lectures 17, 18 and 19: Shortest Path Algorithms - good coders code, great reuse
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms-part-twelve/
I’m Attending MIT, Stanford & Harvard ~ Mattias Geniar
http://mattiasgeniar.be/2009/01/29/im-attending-mit-stanford-harvard/

Free classes

online courses to check out

Check the courses offered

In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn't come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes' goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses. The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror -- all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The setup, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface -- walls, the body of another person or even your hand.

Holy crap.

dude honestly insane

The best way to describe Siftables might be "Blocks that can think." Visit the website to watch a TED presentation of these fantastic devices.

What are Siftables? Siftables are cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. They act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them - piling, grouping, sorting - to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications.

What do one mathematician, one artist, and one musician all have in common? Are you interested in zen Buddhism, math, fractals, logic, paradoxes, infinities, art, language, computer science, physics, music, intelligence, consciousness and unified theories? Get ready to chase me down a rabbit hole into Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Lectures will be a place for crazy ideas to bounce around as we try to pace our way through this enlightening tome. You will be responsible for most of the reading as lectures will consist primarily of motivating the material and encouraging discussion. I advise everyone seriously interested to buy the book, grab on and get ready for a mind-expanding voyage into higher dimensions of recursive thinking.

Cool demo of sixth sense device at TED.

TED Talks This demo -- from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

TED presentation - Social media in the real world - minority report like

This demo -- from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

TED Talks This demo -- from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

Wearable interface of the future

Lectures

This is the thirteenth post in an article series about MIT’s lecture course “Introduction to Algorithms.” In this post I will review lectures twenty and twenty-one on parallel algorithms. These lectures cover the basics of multithreaded programming and multithreaded algorithms.

A one-week course in iPhone SDK Development

mit Online Course Materials education tolearn

During the summer of 2007, Gödel, Escher, Bach was recorded especially for OpenCourseWare. Below are links to the videos, along with breakdowns of the video content.

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Navigate * Website * Twitter * Subscribe * Archives * Random Subscribe by Email MIT Database Systems (6.830) TA Course Notes In Fall 2008, I had the pleasure of TAing Database Systems with Sam Madden, Mike Stonebraker, and Evan Jones. I figured that I could take notes to help students follow the lectures while clarifying any confusing points that were raised during discussion. It would also help me avoid the embarrassment of forgetting something mentioned during a lecture and having students explain it to me during office hours:). I decided to take notes in plain text, mostly out of laziness. This turned out to be a challenge for drawing things like query plans, but forced me to distill explanations into a conversational tone that provided an alternative to traditional diagrams. Some students in the class told me that they benefited from and enjoyed the notes, and so I decided to open them up for reuse

this lectures uses Playstation3 in their course.

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more **

Web

Learn How your students can create and share with Scratch

Could it be the next RFID+AR mashup? I can see it in pointer apps, tag a space etc.

"Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor. This bokeh-code or Bokode is a barcode design with a simple lenslet over the pattern. We show that an off-the-shelf camera can capture Bokode features of 2.5 microns from a distance of over 4 meters." Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fweb.media.mit.edu%2F%7Eankit%2Fbokode

Who are you when you aren't there?

Personas is an art installation by Aaron Zinman that is a component of Metropath(ologies), an interactive exhibit by the Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab. Metropath(ologies) is by Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba, Aaron Zinman under the direction of Prof. Judith Donath.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Personas is an art installation by Aaron Zinman that is a component of Metropath(ologies), an interactive exhibit by the Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab. Metropath(ologies) is by Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba, Aaron Zinman under the direction of Prof. Judith Donath.

O que você anda fazendo na web? O MIT sabe!

getting me excited about data

Graphs of the impact of Obama on people/demographics in less than 1 year since inauguration.

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more **

ไฟฟ้า ไร้สาย

Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. Here, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT's breakthrough version, WiTricity -- a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker.

Looking under my desk at all the bloody cables, this is definitely something that I am waiting for. Let's hope it comes to the Mac devices before it comes to those sucky PCs

TED Talks Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. Here, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT's breakthrough version, WiTricity -- a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker.

adieu fils et prises

For $150 these MIT students took a balloon 17.5 miles high into the uppermost parts of the stratosphere and returned 5 hours later some 20 miles away from the launch site.

FAA

Small Groups, Big Impact Attempts to Address the Issue

A small crowd is still a crowd.

The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.

At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative." MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information — because you don't have control over your information."

Using data from Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t. Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect.

'guessing' whether someone is gay via FB

Deux étudiants du MIT ont imaginé un outil capable de repérer sur la toile les personnes homosexuelles. Leur outil parcours les sites sociaux à la recherche d'indices comme les goûts musicaux, les choix politiques, les types d'amis, les réactions à l'information... afin de déterminer si les personnes ont une forte proportion de chance ou pas d'être homosexuelles. Leur propos, montrer comment on peut détourner le traitement de l'information que les internautes déversent sur le net.

Article covering some projects analysing how revealing your Facebook friend list can be

MIT programming 101. Very basic python intro

Lecture 1: Goals of the course; what is computation; introduction to data types, operators, and variablesInstructors: Prof. Eric Grimson, Prof. John Guttag V...

This book is the main text for 15.053 Introduction to Optimization taught at MIT. To make the book available online, most chapters have been re-typeset. Chapters 6, 7 and 10 were not, but are still available (as direct scans of the original chapters).

Book on Optimization used for teaching in MIT

Applied Mathematical Programming by Bradley, Hax, and Magnanti (Addison-Wesley, 1977) This book is the main text for 15.053 Introduction to Optimization taught at MIT.

"As you all may know, I watched and posted my lecture notes of the whole MIT Introduction to Algorithms course. In this post I want to summarize all the topics that were covered in the lectures and point out some of the most interesting things in them."

* Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python

TED video of gesture cyborg accessory

TED Talks At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Pranav Mistry demos tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data, including a paper laptop

Broad-based MIT project aims to reinvent AI for a new era. By going back and fixing mistakes, researchers hope to produce ‘co-processors’ for the human mind.

ai

Proyecto del MIT que busca rescatar algunas investigaciones en inteligencia artificial de hace 50 años, para conformar nuevo proyecot MMP

"This time, they are determined to get it right — and, with the advantages of hindsight, experience, the rapid growth of new technologies and insights from the new field of computational neuroscience, they think they have a good shot at it."

Logiciel d'automatisation de tâches dans un OS avec une approche visuelle/graphique.

"Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API's support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator."

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots).

SixthSense technology | Video on TED.com

Bericht im CNN iReport

Two MIT students have photographed the earth from 18 miles in space on a $148 budget using components available off-the-shelf, including a helium-filled latex balloon and $50 GPS-equipped camera-cell phone....

Interesting article about MIT students

This is the eleventh post in an article series about MIT's lecture course Introduction to Algorithms. In this post I ...

alta modalitate de a capta puterea soarelui

Daniel Nocera

http://cleantechnica.com/2008/10/25/mit-energy-storage-discovery-could-lead-to-unlimited-solar-power/

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a new way of storing energy from sunlight that could lead to ‘unlimited’ solar power. The process, loosely based on plant photosynthesis, uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. When needed, the gases can then be re-combined in a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity whether the sun is shining or not.

Interesting. I hate to be cynical, but I wonder if it will take off?

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/ps3/lectures.shtml

This is the second post in an article series about MIT's lecture course Introduction to Algorithms. I changed my mind ...

Behind-the-scenes story about uselessness of consulting companies. But forgets to expose their value. Example: My friend who consulted for a multi-billion company...if it cost $10m and they got 1 bit of insight, it'd be totally worth it

What I could not get my head around was having to force-fit analysis to a conclusion. In one case, the question I was tasked with solving had a clear and unambiguous answer: By my estimate, the client’s plan of action had a net present discounted value of negative one billion dollars. Even after accounting for some degree of error in my reckoning, I could still be sure that theirs was a losing proposition. But the client did not want analysis that contradicted their own, and my manager told me plainly that it was not our place to question what the client wanted.

An emerging field called collective intelligence could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.

collective intelligence

“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence. “For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”

March 2009

News about MIT OA mandate: http://tinyurl.com/c9w4cl [from http://twitter.com/MyOpenArchive/statuses/1399671252]

Peter Suber writes about and comments on MIT's decision to adopt a faculty-wide OA policy, the first of a university doing so across all its departments unanimously. As he rightfully points out, this will send out strong signals to lawmakers and other educational institutions.

0309 - Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by...

This is the tenth post in an article series about MIT's lecture course Introduction to Algorithms. In this post I ...

SJ, ORGANIZACE ZNALOSTÍ

mejora delicious

Facette: Organize Your Delicious Bookmarks: http://tinyurl.com/bsbpp8 [from http://twitter.com/malinkaiva/statuses/1219653606]

나도 거의 이렇게 쓰고 있는데.. 왜 만들 생각을 전혀 못했을까.. 사실 능력도 없지만 최소한 생각이라도 했어야 하는데..

Why Did M.I.T. Switch from Scheme to Python?

The freshman software engineering course (...) is now nearly thirty years old. Engineering has changed quite a lot in thirty years. Since 1995, Gerry and his co-author Prof. Hal Abelson have advocated changing the freshman curriculum radically, not basing it on SICP. In 1980, computer engineering was based on starting with clearly-defined things (primitives or small programs) and using them to build larger things that ended up being clearly-defined. Composition of these fragments was the name of the game. However, nowadays, a real engineer is given a big software library, with a 300-page manual that’s full of errors. He’s also given a robot, whose exact behavior is extremely hard to characterize (what happens when a wheel slips?).

"In 1980, computer engineering was based on starting with clearly-defined things (primitives or small programs) and using them to build larger things that ended up being clearly-defined. Composition of these fragments was the name of the game... Nowadays, a real engineer is given a big software library, with a 300-page manual that’s full of errors. He’s also given a robot, whose exact behavior is extremely hard to characterize (what happens when a wheel slips?). The engineer must learn to perform scientific experiments to find out how the software and hardware actually work, at least enough to accomplish the job at hand. We may not like it this way (”because we’re old fogies”), but that’s the way it is..."

Dan Weinreb’s blog » Blog Archive » Why Did M.I.T. Switch from Scheme to Python?

Some explanation of why MIT switched from Scheme to Python.

This course provides a thorough introduction to the C programming language, the workhorse of the UNIX operating system and lingua franca of embedded processors and micro-controllers. The first two weeks will cover basic syntax and grammar, and expose students to practical programming techniques. The remaining lectures will focus on more advanced concepts, such as dynamic memory allocation, concurrency and synchronization, UNIX signals and process control, library development and usage. Daily programming assignments and weekly laboratory exercises are required. Knowledge of C is highly marketable for summer internships, UROPs, and full-time positions in software and embedded systems development.

This course provides a thorough introduction to the C programming language, the workhorse of the UNIX operating system and lingua franca of embedded processors and micro-controllers. The first two weeks will cover basic syntax and grammar, and expose students to practical programming techniques. The remaining lectures will focus on more advanced concepts, such as dynamic memory allocation, concurrency and synchronization, UNIX signals and process control, library development and usage. Daily programming assignments and weekly laboratory exercises are required. Knowledge of C is highly marketable for summer internships, UROPs, and full-time positions in software and embedded systems development.

This course provides a thorough introduction to the C programming language, the workhorse of the UNIX operating system and lingua franca of embedded processors and micro-controllers. The first two weeks will cover basic syntax and grammar, and expose students to practical programming techniques. The remaining lectures will focus on more advanced concepts, such as dynamic memory allocation, concurrency and synchronization, UNIX signals and process control, library development and usage. Daily programming assignments and weekly laboratory exercises are required. Knowledge of C is highly marketable for summer internships, UROPs, and full-time positions in software and embedded systems development.

Mathematics for Computer Science