Data Science Briefing #256

Issue #256

September 18, 2024


Book of the Week

This week's book is "Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI" by A. Ananthaswamy. The book introduces the main ideas and developments of Artificial Intelligence clearly and concisely. Starting with the invention of the Perceptron in the 50s, through all the significant developments of the last several decades, such as Support Vector Machines, Hopfield Networks, and Backpropagation, to the latest developments in Large Language Models. Ananthaswamy explains how they fit in the historical development of Computer Science and AI, as well as how they connect to insights originating in biology and psychology.

The book targets a general audience familiar with basic math. Mathematical concepts such as probability and linear algebra are introduced in an intuitive way that provides just enough detail to understand the more technical parts of the text. Overall, a great resource whether your reviewing these concepts or encountering them for the first time.

Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI


Links of the Week
  1. 1. How does cosine similarity work? [tomhazledine.com]
  2. 2. B-trees and database indexes [planetscale.com]
  3. 3. Learning to Reason with LLMs [openai.com]
  4. 4. Geometric Search Trees [g-trees.github.io]
  5. 5. Novel Architecture Makes Neural Networks More Understandable [quantamagazine.org]
  6. 6. How I Mastered Data Structures and Algorithms [medium.com/algomaster-io]
  7. 7. How the LLM Got Lost in the Network and Discovered Graph Reasoning [towardsdatascience.com]

Papers of the Week
Video of the Week

Terence Tao at IMO 2024: AI and Mathematics

Terence Tao at IMO 2024: AI and Mathematics

All our videos are also available in our YouTube playlist.


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