Indeed, I highly recommend the MLCC by Google if you want to go deeper technically speaking and more hands on. My deck was aimed at complete beginners (even those with no / limited math background). Having taken courses like the MLCC myself way back when I found that there were some gaps in my own knowledge before I could appreciate that in its entirety which is in part how my deck came about to being.
The GIFs for the product demos such as the ones I have for Soli etc can be made by dragging an MP4 into Photoshop and then exporting for web as GIF after resizing. You can then drag those into Google slides and resize as needed.
Minor correction: the Boston Dynamics robots don't use machine learning. This is a common misconception, but almost all robots today still use hardwired control laws. We don't really know how to make robots that can teach themselves how to do things yet.
However, I would be really surprised if they didn’t use machine learning! Their robots have strong perception systems. How do they accomplish that without machine learning?
It doesn't look like they are using a classifier to do object recognition, although I confess I've never heard of the "sequential composition of cost funnels" the post is describing, neither do I claim to have understood it at any depth just from that post.
In any case, it does look like most of their AI (if you would even call it that) is hand-crafted. I understand that this is the done thing in robotics, in general.
Note also the various announcements by prominent deep learning groups, like DeepMind and OpenAI, about teaching robots, or robot hands, to manipulate various objects of limited shapes and forms. If deep learning and deep reinforcement learning was particularly successful in training robots to interact with real-world environments, you can bet you'd see a lot more announcements advertising this, with titles like "We taught a robot to peel potatoes using deep learning" etc.
It would be interesting to see if other machine learning techniques are often used with robotics. I am aware of one paper [1] that uses Inductive Logic Programming for robot vision, but robotics is really not my field so I'm probably missing lots of other work.
I see this is referred to as a deck, but I don't know what that means. What is the specific meaning of deck in this context? Where do I see more decks like this?
Reference is to slide deck. A deck of slides. This presentation was created using Google Slides (slides.google.com). I am sure others exist but its up to the creator to make them public / shared for others to see.
This was on purpose. This is a "living deck" so will be updated from time to time and didn't want to maintain several copies. If you have the Google Drive app I believe you can download for offline viewing and then it will sync automatically when connection.
That seems fine for a 101 course. If students are compelled to continue, they will find all sorts of breadcrumbs from 102 onwards. Or do I just have low standards?
