Looks interesting. Also, check out the link to "CS 373: PROGRAMMING A ROBOTIC CAR".

By the way, in that video, Sergey Brin looks older and really tired!

Indeed, he does look REALLY tired!

Why do none of these classes ever seem to provide enough information about the actual content? For example what programming language will be used in this class?

The course will use Python. There will be more detailed information posted about the course soon, but I'll try to answer any questions you have here.

"but I'll try to answer any questions you have here."

ok so here is a question.

How do you plan to let people online actually program a robotic car? (More likely) Do you plan to have some kind of simulated environment? Make hardware accessible through the web? actually run student programs on hardware (and send results back to students)? Make datasets from actual car sensors available?

I am just wondering about the scope of the course here. More information would be great.

Tangential: Does anyone actually write Robotics code in Python? All real life examples I've seen (that actually drive robots vs teach an algorithm) uses C/C++.

The robotic car class is a separate class, so I'm not able to answer all the questions about that one. (I am pretty sure, though, we won't be able to actually send people physical robotic cars! There will be a simulated environment, but it will use real data.)

"The robotic car class is a separate class, so I'm not able to answer all the questions about that one"

Oops. Sorry about that. My mistake :). Hopefully someone from the "robotic car" class will pop in.

Not relevant to your course, but do you know if it is planned to put other courses, like Compilers, Programming Languages Theory, Symbolic AI and maybe also Operating Systems, in the near future?

Yes, there are plans to develop enough courses to cover all the major topics that would be part of a good university CS degree (although not always following the traditional structure of these courses), but it will be a while before more courses are launched.

Could you please point me to the reading list? Also, it would be great if you put course notes text besides videos.

Week 3 is "Crawling the web" (the whole Web??!?) and Week 4 is "Responding to search queries"; shouldn't "Building an index" be somewhere in Week 3.5?

Do people need to learn how to build a search engine for the Web, complete with crawling and PageRank, etc., or do they rather need to know how to build a search engine for a specific corpus of documents that they have sitting around somewhere...?

Week 4 is mostly about building an index.

The point of the class isn't for people to build their own personal search engine to actually use, but to use the experience of building and understanding a search engine as a vehicle for introducing computer science and programming.

I guess week 4 would go like "to answer the query X we go through all the data, this is slow, so let's build an index"