Notes

The Web pages that will be posted here are not a full or complete set of lecture notes. If you miss a lecture, be sure to check with other students in the class for what went on. The definitive set of material for the course is that which is presented or referred to in the lectures.
  1. Some general software tools of interest and use
    1. Accessing remote machines is dangerous if you send passwords in the clear. Use ssh to set up a more secure way of transfering files, and especially for opening windows from a remote machine on a local console. The CS department's systems staff has more up-to-date notes showing how to use OpenSSH, which is now a campus standard. They also have other platform notes about using SSH from a web browser or Windows.
    2. Makefiles are not necessary in Matlab, but are for codes that require configuration and compilation. This explanation is here in case anyone encounters that situation.
  2. Basic Matlab
    1. Intro to Matlab
    2. Matlab Help
    3. Getting Data into Matlab
    4. Matlab Array Notation
    5. General Matlab Notes
    6. More Matlab Plotting
    7. Matlab functions and script files
  3. Computer architecture basics
    1. January 23, 2008 slides on computer architecture in pdf or ps format.
  4. Matlab relational operators and logical arrays. Also see the diary from the lecture.
    1. flop_equality.m, a short example of why tests for equality between floating point values should never be used.
    2. A Matlab script with basic notes about Booleans
    3. A Matlab script about logical arrays. Basic message: logical arrays are not the same as double arrays, even though logical arrays appear to just contain 0's and 1's.
    4. You can use logical arrays in arithmetic operations with value arrays ("value arrays" == arrays of double precision numbers), which makes things confusing. This is amply illustrated by the script sigs.m. I'd advise against doing this and instead just using logical arrays to index into vectors of values, but unfortunately it is a common Matlab idiom so get used to it.
  5. The singular value decomposition and using it for doing optimal retrieval of text documents. The SVD is used in latent semantic indexing, which may or may not be of use to everyone ... the key skills here are how to use Matlab to manipulate text and files.
    1. The slides from February, in Postscript or PDF
    2. Undocumented auxillary Matlab scripts used for the text retrieval example in class: babytalk_2dspace.m and babytalk_cosines.m
    3. You should also get the files for the third and fourth assignments, in a single tarball.
    4. The Matlab diary file for 03March2008 is probably not useful or helpful, because with "echo on" and the large numbers of files and terms being manipulated, 6k lines where generated.
  6. M-files for basic stats and data exploration. Even though the last item is a link, read directory permissions are not set for the directory the files are in. So download the whole ball of wax as a tar file. This block of codes also includes some additional plotting things and error-handling shown.
  7. Matlab diaries
    8. . This link has been updated (thanks to someone pointing out it had not been). The 03-Mar-2008 one is probably not of much use to you, but the 05-Mar-2008 one is.
  8. Matlab diaries
    9. now has these:
  9. Matlab diaries
    10. now has the ones from the GUI stuff last week:

    Changes to this page:
    1. Initialized, Jan 2008
    2. Matlab Notes added Thu Jan 17 16:59:36 EST 2008
    3. Notes on relational operators added, Mon Feb 4 11:36:12 EST 2008
    4. Notes on LSI and SVD, Mon Mar 3 15:14:55 EST 2008
    5. Added diary files, reorganized architecture notes for outline, Mon Mar 3 15:52:26 EST 2008
    6. Updated link to diary files, Wed Mar 5 13:50:25 EST 2008
    7. Added notes on stats, Mon Apr 7 18:46:31 EDT 2008
    8. Updated link to diary files, 16-Apr-2008 04:07:17 PM