Announcements

Dear AML students,

As you may have heard, staff and students across the university are to be going on strike over the next few weeks. Going on strike is the last resort for staff: we love teaching and care very much about our students and your education. And staff also are not paid for the days they are on strike, so it really is a last resort!

From Monday 28 September, Oisin, myself, and potentially some of our TA staff, alongside many colleagues across the university will go on strike (this includes a digital picket) as a result of University of Edinburgh senior management’s catastrophic cuts, including hidden redundancies and a refusal to rule out compulsory redundancies.

You can read details for why we’re striking now and a comprehensive background on University leadership’s mismanagement.

What does this mean for you? For the duration of the strike,

• there will be no Q&A sessions
• there may be no tutors or lab demonstrators available for your assigned group
• those of us on strike will not engage with questions and discussions via any medium: EdStem, email, etc.

TAs on strike and not attending your sessions have been asked to try and inform you of such by the day before at the latest, to ensure that those of you with commutes, caring responsibilities, and more, will not be inconvenienced any more than we can help. Oisin and I will not be attending any of the sessions that fall within the strike period.

Note that whatever part of the syllabus that we do not cover during the strikes, rest assured that any subsequent assessment will not involve testing on that material.

This really is our last resort; we understand you will be frustrated. If you would like to help protect your courses’ future and support our cause

• Send your concerns about the strike to the University’s Principal, Professor Peter Mathieson (principal@ed.ac.uk), and ask him to listen to and negotiate meaningfully with staff and with UCU, our union.
• Tell your friends about the dispute!
• Join pickets and teach-outs: information on pickets (where many of your teachers and support services staff will be) and teach-outs taking place during the strike will be available on UCU Edinburgh’s branch website and social media. Future meetings of the Staff-Student Assembly will also be advertised there.

We really hope that the dispute can be resolved as soon as possible so that we can come back to work and teach you! In the meantime, carry on preparing for your weekly classes (you will not be examined on any untaught material or material that was not covered due to the strike), and continue to meet with your fellow students.¹

If you’re experiencing a difficult situation and wish to speak to someone in confidence, refer to the Advice Place or the out-of-hours student support page.

Staff and students are what make our university - the university cannot function without us.

best
Oisin and Sid

Greetings AML students!

This is an announcement for all those registered for Applied Machine Learning (AML - INFR11211) in semester one. Please read this carefully as it contains important information.

The full course schedule and lectures are available on this page.

Class Sessions

The first class meeting is next week (Tuesday 22nd September) at 4:10pm in Appleton Tower - Lecture Theatre 5.

Make sure to attend this session on time as we will discuss many of the logistics of the course and you will also have an opportunity to ask questions there. It will be recorded in case you cannot make it.

Lectures, Labs, and Tutorials

The lectures for AML are pre-recorded and will be available from our course website one week in advance of each topic. There will also be an in-person tutorial or lab session held every other week, with labs in weeks 3, 5, 7, 9, and tutorials in weeks 4, 6, 8, 10. We will discuss this in more detail in our class session on Tuesday.

Questions

For any queries, please come to the class session or post on our discussion forum EdStem.

We hope that you will learn a lot about machine learning and how to apply it over the semester!

Best wishes
Oisin Mac Aodha and Siddharth N.
AML Course Organisers