A

Alex Smola

alex.smola.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2011

Alex Smola is a machine learning researcher who posts course materials and lectures on scalable and introductory machine learning.

What HN saysHN commenters link his CMU and Berkeley course pages and lecture videos as good free resources, with the data streams lectures singled out.
19HN people shared it
11linked it in comments
9stories submitted
582story points
5 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
  2. 2
    Introduction To Machine Learning (Smola & Vishwanathan)
    3 people · 90 points · first shared 2011 · 4 comments on HN
  3. 3
    CMU 10-701 – Introduction to Machine Learning
    3 people · 59 points · first shared 2013 · 3 comments on HN
  4. 4
    NIPS15.pdf
    2 people · first shared 2016
  5. 5
    Introduction to Machine Learning
    1 people · 181 points · first shared 2013 · 21 comments on HN
  6. 6
    CMU's Introduction to Machine Learning Course
    1 people · 151 points · first shared 2013 · 38 comments on HN
  7. 7
    Scalable Machine Learning Lectures
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · 1 comments on HN
  8. 8
    The Effective Sample Size
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    You don't need all the LLM benchmarks
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
  10. 10
    Intro ML Self Evaluation.pdf
    1 people · first shared 2013
  11. 11
    Statistics
    1 people · first shared 2013
  12. 12
    Streams
    1 people · first shared 2012
  13. 13
    Homepage
    1 people · first shared 2019

What HN people wrote when they linked it

EForEndeavour · 2019-01-06
The senior author, Alex Smola, is the director of AWS (and is a big deal: https://alex.smola.org/), which helps explain the choice of Apache MXNet. That said, the authors write that "even if you use other deep learning frameworks in your research or work, we hope that these codes will help you better understand deep learning algorithms."
newtonapple · 2012-08-07
I watched some of the videos they are quite good. The data streams lectures are definitely worth a watch: http://alex.smola.org/teaching/berkeley2012/streams.html.
emcq · 2016-03-08
Yes, on their site they post Torch CuDNN v4 as faster than Leaf [0]. Seems exciting for an early release. Can it get much faster than something like Torch? I would think if CuDNN is doing most of the computation time it would be hard to see big improvements. Perhaps go the route of Neon and tune your GPGPU code like crazy [1, 2], or MXNet and think about distributed computing performance [3]. [0] http://autumnai.com/deep-learning-benchmarks [1] https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks [2] https://github.com/NervanaSystems/neon [3] http://alex.smola.org/talks/NIPS15.pdf
gamapuna · 2015-07-21
liquidcool · 2013-11-11
You may want to look at the self-evaluation, a qualification exam for understanding the material: http://alex.smola.org/teaching/cmu2013-10-701x/slides/Intro_ML_Self_Ev… It would have been a piece of cake in college, but I have not used that math in a long time :-/
elliott99 · 2013-01-21
Maybe my undergraduate institution failed mebut I don't feel that having taken linear algebra, multivariable calc, applied stats, and graduate probability over the summer that the PDF below contains readily accessible information to me. Does it require graduate linear algebra? Graduate multi-v? We're my courses not rigorous enough? Am just not smart enough? I graduated summa cum laude, so maybe I should be okay. All I am saying that is that there seems to be a huge leap between having taken the prerequisites everyone says you should take and then seeing Cramer-Rao bounds on page 70. http://alex.smola.org/drafts/thebook.pdf
plessthanpt05 · 2012-03-14
was mostly thinking of courses that had lectures/vids up, but that also reminds me of this berkeley course i came across on HN a couple of weeks ago: http://alex.smola.org/teaching/berkeley2012/
FractalNerve · 2017-07-31
Before reading the Blog's summary of the paper, I thought hey they're going to analyze the distributed algorithms[1][2] exclusively and give conclusions on how heterogenous hardware usgage of GPU/CPU works (best) when spread over the network/cloud. My guess was that MXNet would win, because Amazon [3][4] and benchmarks favored it[5]. Unfortunately surveys like this are too complex and out of date, when released, due to the fast progress in our field. >> @agibsonccc What exactly would YOU, your company and your team like to see reviewed and what would you make different? A standard benchmark, like the Open-Source, Automated Benchmark provided by the Phoronix-Test-Suite[6] or the benchmarksgame[7] are what we need. Everybody should be able to contribute easily, or even anonymously like with Steam's hardware survey[8]. The main problem with distributing operations with Caffe in example is the need to learn another system for a different programing flavor. -- References [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_algorithm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Distributed_algorithms [3] http://www.infoworld.com/article/3144025/cloud-computing/why-amazon-pi… [4] http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/11/mxnet-default-framework-de… [5] See Page 52 - http://alex.smola.org/talks/NIPS15.pdf [6] https://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/ [7] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ [8]…

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