As the latest in a very long line of marginal career shifts winding up in unintended places, I seem to have agreed to become module lead for the COMP0088 Introduction to Machine Learning course. This is not completely out of the blue—I am already, in some partial & impermanent fashion, counted among the UCL Computer Science teaching staff—but so far I’ve been able to get away with just doing things like project supervision and tutorials and (ugh) marking rather than actual full blown lecturing. No longer, it seems.
Obviously I am ambivalent about this; I’m ambivalent about everything. On the one hand, AAAARGH! I feel like the absolute last person who should be teaching anyone about anything. On the other, I Have Opinions about how it should be done for this subject in particular, and it seems I can no longer just smugly hold those from the sidelines but must actually put them to the test. Eek.
One consequence of the prospect of having a corpus of actual students is an inchoate but subtly nagging sense that perhaps I should have a less disreputable—and possibly even up to date—web presence, in case the little bastards google me. I don’t know whether that might take the form of a direct successor blog—WT5—or some separate work-specific thing, and of course doing nothing also remains a popular option. So for the moment I’m just noting that the question exists, and while it simmers on the back burner I might try to post a bit more often than once a year, if only to push the notably disreputable previous post off the front page. (Though in point of fact, that post is legitimately work-related in ways that may or may not be clarified soon.)