Stanford's Online Courses: ml-class, ai-class and db-class

About three months ago, I signed up to Stanford's first-of-its-kind, free, online courses on Artifical Intelligence, Machine Learning and Databases. I have now successfully completed all three courses!

• The Artifical Intelligence (ai-class) class, led by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, covered probability, Bayes networks, machine learning, planning, Markov decision processes (MDPs), particle filters, game theory, computer vision, robotics and natural language processing. There were in-class quizzes, homework exercises and two exams.
• The Machine Learning (ml-class) class, led by Professor Andrew Ng, covered supervised learning (linear regression, logistic regression, neural networks, support vector machines), unsupervised learning (k-Means clustering), anomaly detection and recommender systems. There were in-class quizzes, review questions and programming exercises.
• The Introduction to Databases(db-class) class, led by Professor Jennifer Widom, covered relational databases, relational algebra, XML, XPaths, SQL, UML, constraints, triggers, transactions, authorization, recursion and NoSQL systems. There were in-class quizzes, assignments, including practical exercises (such as creating triggers, writing SQL or XPaths that would run on a set of data) and two exams.

Even though I had studied these topics a long time ago at university, I found it really useful to refresh my memory. They took up quite a bit of time (about 2 hours a week for each class), but it was definitely worth it.

I am now looking forward to starting some new classes in 2012!