How ed tech was born: Twentieth-century teaching machines--from Sidney Pressey's mechanized test-giver to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Contrary to popular belief, ed tech did not begin with videos on the internet. The idea of technology that would allow students to "go at their own pace" did not originate in Silicon Valley. In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas--bite-sized content, individualized instruction--that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning. Watters pays particular attention to the role of the media--newspapers, magazines, television, and film--in shaping people's perceptions of teaching machines as well as the psychological theories underpinning them. She considers these machines in the context of education reform, the political reverberations of Sputnik, and the rise of the testing and textbook industries. She chronicles Skinner's attempts to bring his teaching machines to market, culminating in the famous behaviorist's efforts to launch Didak 101, the "pre-verbal" machine that taught spelling. (Alternate names proposed by Skinner include "Autodidak," "Instructomat," and "Autostructor.") Telling these somewhat cautionary tales, Watters challenges what she calls "the teleology of ed tech"--the idea that not only is computerized education inevitable, but technological progress is the sole driver of events.

Machine learning techniques provide cost-effective alternatives to traditional methods for extracting underlying relationships between information and data and for predicting future events by processing existing information to train models. Efficient Learning Machines explores the major topics of machine learning, including knowledge discovery, classifications, genetic algorithms, neural networking, kernel methods, and biologically-inspired techniques. Mariette Awad and Rahul Khanna’s synthetic approach weaves together the theoretical exposition, design principles, and practical applications of efficient machine learning. Their experiential emphasis, expressed in their close analysis of sample algorithms throughout the book, aims to equip engineers, students of engineering, and system designers to design and create new and more efficient machine learning systems. Readers of Efficient Learning Machines will learn how to recognize and analyze the problems that machine learning technology can solve for them, how to implement and deploy standard solutions to sample problems, and how to design new systems and solutions. Advances in computing performance, storage, memory, unstructured information retrieval, and cloud computing have coevolved with a new generation of machine learning paradigms and big data analytics, which the authors present in the conceptual context of their traditional precursors. Awad and Khanna explore current developments in the deep learning techniques of deep neural networks, hierarchical temporal memory, and cortical algorithms. Nature suggests sophisticated learning techniques that deploy simple rules to generate highly intelligent and organized behaviors with adaptive, evolutionary, and distributed properties. The authors examine the most popular biologically-inspired algorithms, together with a sample application to distributed datacenter management. They also discuss machine learning techniques for addressing problems of multi-objective optimization in which solutions in real-world systems are constrained and evaluated based on how well they perform with respect to multiple objectives in aggregate. Two chapters on support vector machines and their extensions focus on recent improvements to the classification and regression techniques at the core of machine learning.

Introduces professionals and scientists to statistics and machine learning using the programming language R Written by and for practitioners, this book provides an overall introduction to R, focusing on tools and methods commonly used in data science, and placing emphasis on practice and business use. It covers a wide range of topics in a single volume, including big data, databases, statistical machine learning, data wrangling, data visualization, and the reporting of results. The topics covered are all important for someone with a science/math background that is looking to quickly learn several practical technologies to enter or transition to the growing field of data science. The Big R-Book for Professionals: From Data Science to Learning Machines and Reporting with R includes nine parts, starting with an introduction to the subject and followed by an overview of R and elements of statistics. The third part revolves around data, while the fourth focuses on data wrangling. Part 5 teaches readers about exploring data. In Part 6 we learn to build models, Part 7 introduces the reader to the reality in companies, Part 8 covers reports and interactive applications and finally Part 9 introduces the reader to big data and performance computing. It also includes some helpful appendices. Provides a practical guide for non-experts with a focus on business users Contains a unique combination of topics including an introduction to R, machine learning, mathematical models, data wrangling, and reporting Uses a practical tone and integrates multiple topics in a coherent framework Demystifies the hype around machine learning and AI by enabling readers to understand the provided models and program them in R Shows readers how to visualize results in static and interactive reports Supplementary materials includes PDF slides based on the book’s content, as well as all the extracted R-code and is available to everyone on a Wiley Book Companion Site The Big R-Book is an excellent guide for science technology, engineering, or mathematics students who wish to make a successful transition from the academic world to the professional. It will also appeal to all young data scientists, quantitative analysts, and analytics professionals, as well as those who make mathematical models.

Technology promises to make learning better, cheaper, faster—but rarely has it kept that promise. The allure of educational technology is easy to understand. Classroom instruction is an expensive and time-consuming process fraught with contradictory theories and frustratingly uneven results. Educators, inspired by machines’ contributions to modern life, have been using technology to facilitate teaching for centuries. In Teaching Machines, Bill Ferster examines past attempts to automate instruction from the earliest use of the postal service for distance education to the current maelstrom surrounding Massive Open Online Courses. He tells the stories of the entrepreneurs and visionaries who, beginning in the colonial era, developed and promoted various instructional technologies. Ferster touches on a wide range of attempts to enhance the classroom experience with machines, from hornbooks, the Chautauqua movement, and correspondence courses to B. F. Skinner’s teaching machine, intelligent tutoring systems, and eLearning. The famed progressive teachers, researchers, and administrators that the book highlights often overcame substantial hurdles to implement their ideas, but not all of them succeeded in improving the quality of education. Teaching Machines provides invaluable new insight into our current debate over the efficacy of educational technology.

The recent rapid growth in the variety and complexity of new machine learning architectures requires the development of improved methods for designing, analyzing, evaluating, and communicating machine learning technologies. Statistical Machine Learning: A Unified Framework provides students, engineers, and scientists with tools from mathematical statistics and nonlinear optimization theory to become experts in the field of machine learning. In particular, the material in this text directly supports the mathematical analysis and design of old, new, and not-yet-invented nonlinear high-dimensional machine learning algorithms. Features: Unified empirical risk minimization framework supports rigorous mathematical analyses of widely used supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement machine learning algorithms Matrix calculus methods for supporting machine learning analysis and design applications Explicit conditions for ensuring convergence of adaptive, batch, minibatch, MCEM, and MCMC learning algorithms that minimize both unimodal and multimodal objective functions Explicit conditions for characterizing asymptotic properties of M-estimators and model selection criteria such as AIC and BIC in the presence of possible model misspecification This advanced text is suitable for graduate students or highly motivated undergraduate students in statistics, computer science, electrical engineering, and applied mathematics. The text is self-contained and only assumes knowledge of lower-division linear algebra and upper-division probability theory. Students, professional engineers, and multidisciplinary scientists possessing these minimal prerequisites will find this text challenging yet accessible. About the Author: Richard M. Golden (Ph.D., M.S.E.E., B.S.E.E.) is Professor of Cognitive Science and Participating Faculty Member in Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Golden has published articles and given talks at scientific conferences on a wide range of topics in the fields of both statistics and machine learning over the past three decades. His long-term research interests include identifying conditions for the convergence of deterministic and stochastic machine learning algorithms and investigating estimation and inference in the presence of possibly misspecified probability models.

Introduction -- Supervised learning -- Bayesian decision theory -- Parametric methods -- Multivariate methods -- Dimensionality reduction -- Clustering -- Nonparametric methods -- Decision trees -- Linear discrimination -- Multilayer perceptrons -- Local models -- Kernel machines -- Graphical models -- Brief contents -- Hidden markov models -- Bayesian estimation -- Combining multiple learners -- Reinforcement learning -- Design and analysis of machine learning experiments.