No disrespect to the parent, but I would strongly discourage any aspiring computer scientist or software engineer from concluding that the above list of topics is in any way remedial or “lower division”.
Just over a decade ago Netflix paid out a million bucks (that was real money then) for a modest improvement over their existing recommender based on an SVD-like gradient descent for a low-rank approximate factorization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize. Many of the competing teams had exemplary academic and industrial pedigree.
Many (if not most) ML practitioners would profit from thinking more about the information-theoretic links between lossy compression, regularization via norm, and channel capacity to this day.
If I correctly gather that this is a syllabus for elite undergraduates, they’ll be grading on a curve.
fully agree. I remember at one point I studied the Perron-Frobenius theorem because I was analyzing a problem in a different domain but mathematically not completely dissimilar to PageRank, and it was crazy to think that a trillion-dollar company had come out of that bit of math.
> Many (if not most) ML practitioners would profit from thinking more about the information-theoretic links between lossy compression, regularization via norm, and channel capacity to this day.
Google exists in no small part because just over 20 years ago people who could also code and raise money connected just a few of the dots on the deep themes connecting those topics: https://www.rose-hulman.edu/~bryan/googleFinalVersionFixed.p...
Just over a decade ago Netflix paid out a million bucks (that was real money then) for a modest improvement over their existing recommender based on an SVD-like gradient descent for a low-rank approximate factorization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize. Many of the competing teams had exemplary academic and industrial pedigree.
Many (if not most) ML practitioners would profit from thinking more about the information-theoretic links between lossy compression, regularization via norm, and channel capacity to this day.
If I correctly gather that this is a syllabus for elite undergraduates, they’ll be grading on a curve.