One of the main research directions for my PhD is likely to be experimenting with bispoke probabilistic graphical models for representing multi-state appliances like washing machines.  As such, I need to learn about existing probabilistic graphical models.  For the past few days I’ve been reading a textbook called “Probabilistic Graphical Models” by Koller and Friedman.  So far I’ve really enjoyed the book.

Over lunch today, a friend of mine told me that Stanford are running a free on-line course on Probabilistic Graphical Models, presented by Koller. I’ve signed up - it looks like a great course; it starts in Feb. Stanford are also running a course on Information Theory, which I’ve also signed up for.