The PIGlets Book

The point of PIGlets is that it's supposed to bring students in groups working on probabilistic inference together to learn about topics that weren't covered in the postgraduate courses (most likely PMR and MLPR). How this usually works is we meet biweekly and agree to review a paper or textbook on an agreed topic. One person leads the discussion on it with a short presentation and then we discuss.

Unfortunately, this is kind of inefficient as far as actually learning about these topics goes. One volunteer has to do a lot of work to prepare the material and lead the discussion, for very little reward. Once the session is over, the material they've prepared is gone. We should keep this material somewhere, and we should make it easy to repurpose it.

Making PIGlets More Worthwhile

For each volunteer covering a topic, we should make sure they're getting as much out of putting their time in as we can. Keeping materials, sources, and rough notes on the topic here, in this book, is a good way do this.

This is good if the volunteer wants to help as many people as possible, because the material is always there in the future. If the volunteer makes informal notes on a subject then the markdown can be easily converted to a blog post. In machine learning, blog posts can be the best resources to learn about a subject; examples: Shakir's blog, Karpathy's blog, Eyescream writeup, Yarin Gal's blog. People will appreciate it if you explain a subject well in an informal tone, versus the formal tone of academic writing.

Having the materials available forever is also good for people attending. Topics may turn out to be relevant to people long after the session, and being able to go back to materials or find the person who presented on it for questions is definitely useful.

How To Use This Book

When you're researching the subject to put together the materials for leading a discussion, or running a tutorial, or running a practical, keep an editor open to write rough notes on the topic into this book. We want to keep notes on the parts that are confusing, links to useful learning materials and any important points you think might be worth mentioning explicitly.

The notes can be as sparse or dense as you like (for example, if you actually are planning on making a blog post). If you're making a presentation, maybe you could host the slides somewhere and link them into this book? For tutorials, keep a record of the exercises and solutions. Basically, so someone in the future could come back to learn about something we've already covered.