Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The
ECE 697EO course taught me how to fish is how I would want to summarize my experience learning
this course.
This course has been nothing less than a thought provoking, motivating joy ride. I have taken so many
courses till now but I can safely say this is the course which I will remember all through my life. The
reason is it has taught me learning of learning. It has exposed me to so many new adventures in the
world- may it be the Online learning through finance course, may it be google self driving cars, or even
about the origin of human species.
We learned inherent , and somewhat disguised, Seth Lloyd was hitting on two general foundational
problematics. One involved self-reference ( paradox) and the other external reference (
hierarchy). Prof discussed the significance of Tarski and his schema T in this context and applied it to
Who is on First. Learnt how Argawal ( Professor at MIT and President of EdX) , defines engineering and
relates it to hierarchy in the case of ECE.On initial reflection concerning the role of engineers and
engineering , we quickly observed that it was about dealing with complexity--Argawal notes
immediately how the lump circuit abstraction is used to manage the underlying complexity of e&m
phenomena ( nature ) as described by Maxwells equations ( I suggest you review Argawals clip with this
in mind) . Though he does not state it explicitly , he then goes on to describe the architecture of
ECE hierarchically. Here he is borrowing from Herman Simons 1962 classic paper "The Architecture of
Complexity" .
Principle of Specific Reference: It was indeed important to learn how we should practice the habit of
specific reference when we borrow things or ideas from someone elses work.
Coursera finance course: Never before did I realize that an online course could be so much effective in
learning something completely new.
Workshops: Each workshop was challenging and thought provoking and at the same time pure fun to
wite our own article on the new things we learnt in class.
Learning of learning :At a certain level of complexity , Systems require an ability to learn. Engineering
such systems entails engineering learning--VonFoerster was ahead of his time in this regard. We can
certainly see the concern for education already being expressed by Simon. In retrospect , in this
context, it should come as no surprise that the first two MOOCs, Udacity and Coursera were founded by
two engineers both of whom were intitially working on AI/machine learning applied to cyberphysical
systems : Sebastian Thrun ( founder of Udacity) who led the Google Car project and Andrew Ng (
founder of Coursera) , who taught the Machine Learning course at Stanford.
Luhmans theory:Our exploration of theory as a way to engineer complex systems confronts us with
foundation issues regarding the difference between deterministic (trivial) and non-deterministic (nontrivial) machines. We arrive at Luhmanns general systems theory providing a rich theoretical frame
that , among other things , distinguishes between social and psyche autopoietic systems , with social
systems being comprised of communications, the focus of Luhmann's work. We further discover the
special significance of decisions as the communication element of organizations.

Although they are each in the others environment, autopoiesis is mediated by meaning in both social
and psyche systems . For the purpose of the present workshop , a scheme for the dimensions of
meaning for the Psyche system is given below. Compare this to the scheme fot dimensions of meaning
for the Autopoiesis of Social systems offered by Luhmann."Luhmann's Theory of Autopoietic social
systems" by David Seidl. Seth LLoyds " Touring Test for Free Will" are the most notable works I have
come across.
I learnt about the Google cars which are self-driving cars are designed to navigate safely through city
streets.They have sensors designed to detect objects as far as two football fields away in all directions,
including pedestrians, cyclists and vehiclesor even fluttering plastic shopping bags and rogue birds.
The software processes all the information to help the car safely navigate the road without getting tired
or distracted.
We were exposed to the magical world of Machine learning and deep learning and AI. We learn that
decisions are emitted as a result of the pressure of perception of a
possible collision/accident. Apparently, the safety driver is logging in nearly as many miles as
Chauffeur. We said ' the disappointed party is the one that must learn' (Luhmann). Disappointed in
the sense of not as expected. Expectations are structural in the roles involving double contingency
. Expectations are related to normality. When a decision is emitted , an abnormality has occurred which
must be "renormalized" . So in this workshop we want to explore the relationship between renormalization, hierarchical Bayes , and deep learning in pursuit of a first principled mathematical
formulation suitable to the design and engineering of this emerging cyber-physical technology.
Renormalization group provides the way to avoid the fatal deficiencies of renormalization --the so called
precision problem and the hierarchy problem that plagued renormalization . Here again we find
language games , so it is easy for the student to think renormalization and renormalization group are
the same thing--this is an example of a categorization fallacy.
The relevance of Renormalization Group would not have been apparent to Luhmann when he was
developing his theory. However, extensive reading of Luhmanns work indicates that he was aware of
the issues that renormalization group would later resolve. Renormalization Group provides the means
to quantify Luhmann enabling empirical testing of the theory , which would be useful for rearguard
engineering.
On a concluding note I would like to mention that I will take a lot of things I learnt from this course in
my professional life as well as personal life. I plan to take more online courses in coursera and udacity
this summer and thus invest in my self development.

Reference: The class lectures , course website and my retrospective thoughts !