Learning Machines
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Teaching Machines
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.
Efficient Learning Machines
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.