Lend od ist

I just finished my first week and want to reflect a bit on why I started this. There are two main reasons: Deepen and broaden my knowledge of Information Theory; and motivate people who might hesitate on taking up the challenge or feel too old to start learning or revisiting a field. The book is very exciting; Mackay's writing is clear and flows nicely, introducing a concept, diving into it, and then out to generalise. His approach is to make you feel as if you are constructing and checking the concepts alongside him. His magic is that the presentation feels both casual and principled, like if you were sitting together with a very smart friend who is explaining you things. I ended this week at page 21, so my current rate is 3 pages per day since I will not be working the weekend. At the current rate I would finish the book in about 6 months. Mackay's prediction for the time required for each exercise worked quite well for me although it took me more time tha...

Hi there, I am a PhD candidate in Computer Vision for Robotics. I use Machine Learning in my research and wanted to get a deeper understanding of the techniques I use. I created this blog to track my progress in going through David Mackay's book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/). I will go through every single exercise in the book in chapter order. My intention is to encourage people to study topics that they used to know, but forgot or that they are afraid to go into because of the effort and time required. I believe we should get rid of excuses when we want to learn something. If something deep in you tells that the information in a book or course is essential, you should go for it. After all, you will be better equipped to reflect on the necessity of the learning while you actually go through it. I will post weekly , keeping track of the time spent in each exercise and overall time spent in each ...