Self Taught

If you feel like following along at home, the lectures and exercises for COMP0088 – which is basically all the actual content – can be found on the module GitHub.

(I’m not sure whether the lectures are accessible without a UCL login. In the vanishingly unlikely case that anyone wants to watch and is unable, let me know and I’ll poke at the permissions.)

Update: UCL’s media hosting proved unreliable, so all lectures are now available on the COMP0088 YouTube channel.

Shaggy Dog (1)

A man and a woman walk into a bar. (The man is not really a man and the woman is not really a woman, but the ways in which each of them is not what they seem are radically different.) We can call them Adam and Eve — though those are not, obviously, their real names.

The bar is busy, at least by pandemic standards. The clientele mostly male — this is the City, after all. Sexual liberation is a wonderful thing, no question, and the ladies have progressed in leaps and bounds. But there is a natural order here — here, of all places — that isn’t so casually to be tossed aside. The financial services game is fundamentally hormonal.

At some random table — the place is table service only, these days — a man named Harry sits with friends. Colleagues, really — he’s happy to drink with them, but he wouldn’t donate a kidney. They talk about work. One of them is going through a messy divorce, but who wants to hear about that? The other is plagued by dreams in which he pulls out his own teeth, agonisingly, blood pouring down his chin, night after night. They talk about the football.

Unlike Adam and Eve, Harry is exactly what he appears. Thomas Pink shirt, almost but not quite adventurous Paul Smith tie. Weak sardonic smile that’s more of a smirk. Somewhere in there is a personality he doesn’t dare to acknowledge, so he wears quirky Muppet socks instead, barely visible between trouser cuffs and brogues.

Adam strides over, purposefully. (He is always purposeful, but his purposes are obscure to the point of contradiction.) Fixes Harry with a piercing gaze. Beckons Eve.

“This one! Harry, isn’t it?” Harry, having never seen either of these people before in his life, is nonplussed. “He’s handsome, see? I think so. Don’t you think he’s handsome?” Eve looks sceptical, though it is unclear to Harry whether that’s directed at him or her companion; safest to assume both, he decides foggily.

“I think you should take him.”

Later, when the police ask — quite insistently — neither divorce friend nor dental nightmare friend can give a coherent description of the visitants. Or the events surrounding them. Indeed, they’re not quite clear whether Harry came to the bar that night or not.

Or, come to think of it, whether they ever knew anyone of that name.

Screen Test

This is a first pass at the first part of the first lecture of the Introduction to Machine Learning module I’ll be teaching in the autumn. The course will use a “blended” format (ie, a combination of online & on campus elements), and the current plan is for all the “lectures” to be pre-recorded like this. So there’ll be 1.5-2 hours a week of this sort of video material, probably broken down into chunks of about this length. But how much the final product resembles this first faltering attempt remains to be seen.

Officious

Yesterday I went to the office for the second time this year; also the second time this week. It was, as you can see, pretty quiet. UCL is still recommending everyone work from home if they can, but sometimes the home environment is really not conducive; for example, when there are dogs running amok.

It seems relatively low risk to go to work when almost no-one else is there, and my commute is just an easy walk. But still, it’s a weird feeling after all this time.