Prelogue

The inspiration of doing this notes is through the encouraging of a quote that I love most:

“But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, […] for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, […] for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness.” — William Johnson Corg.

Knowledge is for distilling, critisizing and sharing. That is the taste of this notes. Specifically, I am also inspired by several researchers and their works in this field of machine learning:

Zachary C. Lipton and Jacob Steinhardt’s Troubling Trends in Machine Learning Scholarship, based on which I try to distinguish the real inspiring and will-be-test-of-time works.
Ferenc Huszár’s blog inFERENCe, the style of simplicity and thought-provoking.
Notes by Karl Stratos, succint and in-depth reformulation.
Francis Bach’s blog on statistics and optimization, real master piece!
Cosma Rohilla Shalizi’s notebook, very Retro.